Headlines Sunday 7th December

Rudd asylum policy a leaky boat to tragedy
Piers Akerman
The inevitability of a replay of the 2001 SIEV-X disaster, with the loss of more than 350 lives, has undeniably increased since the Rudd Labor Government softened its approach to asylum seekers.
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So the false claims worked
Andrew Bolt
If the mother is that fragile and vindictive, why is she the one entrusted with the child?
“STEVE” has been barred from seeing his daughter for seven years. He has never harmed his only child or her mother. He has never threatened them and a court has accepted he is of good character.

But last week, after a tortuous 10-year journey through four courts, more than 20 hearings, 12 psychologists and six lawyers, he was told he could not see his daughter until she came of age…

His wife twice raised sexual-abuse allegations, proven false after months of investigation. But the court accepted she would “shut down” emotionally if Steve was allowed to see his daughter and that her distress would affect her parenting skills.
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Herbal cures make city sick
Andrew Bolt
I’ve never trusted herbal treatments, but never suspected they actually drove people to crime:

Amsterdam has unveiled plans to shutter up to half of its famed brothels and marijuana cafes as part of a major clean-up of its ancient city centre.

The city says it wants to drive organised crime out of the neighbourhood, and is targeting businesses that “generate criminality,” including prostitution, gambling parlours, “smart shops” that sell herbal treatments, head shops and “coffee shops” where marijuana is sold openly.
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The wages of spin
Andrew Bolt
The more that a premier fails, the more people he needs to shout he’s a success. In this case Labor’s disastrous failure to find enough water in time for Victoria’s capital city has Premier John Brumby scrambling for people to hide his party’s shame:
Documents obtained under freedom of information by the The Sunday Age reveal the number of communication officers in the Department of Premier and Cabinet increased from seven to 16 between 2000-01 and 2008…
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Not working for Rudd
Andrew Bolt
That’s some turnover:
THE pace of the 24/7 Government has taken its toll. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has lost about 40 per cent of all new appointments to his private office since last December, and his deputy, Julia Gillard, has lost almost 50 per cent.
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Protesting against gassy greens
Andrew Bolt
An artist protests by doing something utterly shocking:

On 29 September, Francesca Galeazzi walked to the top of a small hill in Greenland’s Jakobshavn fjord carrying a black gas tanks, kneeled down, opened the valve and released 6 kilograms of pure carbon dioxide into the air.
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Stolen money
Andrew Bolt
Frank Devine claims:

However, no movie company can expect to flourish here if shackled by the not-sufficiently-Australian standards that recently saw George Miller and Warner Bros abandon filming in Australia of the super-hero flick Justice League Mortal, after being refused film production tax concessions, which Australia got, reportedly after surrendering to government pressure to tack on a Stolen Generations theme.
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Dear Pakistan: protest this
Andrew Bolt
Thomas Friedman has a frank word to Pakistan about the Mumbai slaughter:

On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?

After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son ˜ purely because they were Sunni Muslims ˜ where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
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Idealists powered by wind
Andrew Bolt
Some youthful idealism is so shiny eyed that it’s frightening ... or comical:

OVER the past five weeks, Jack Fuller has jumped from a moving train in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, handed in a university assignment from Beijing and written a proposal for his honours thesis in Warsaw.

With four mates, he has travelled through 10 countries — from Singapore, through south-east and central Asia to Moscow and across to Poland — by bus, train and tuk-tuk. They cut the carbon emissions involved in getting from their living rooms across Australia to the UN climate change conference in Poznan by 40 per cent — and paid about twice as much for the privilege.

Hang on! Why go in the first place? Why not, say, teleconference instead? Or simply accept that a few more Australian students in Poznan will make not the slightest difference to anything but the emissions?