Headlines Wednesday 17th December

Aren’t we in the facts business?
Andrew Bolt
The Australian tells journalists to get off the warming wagon:

THE word, according to Deborah Cameron, ABC radio’s morning host in Sydney, is that “there could be an ice-free Arctic in 2010”. Precisely whose word, and on what evidence, is unclear. So is the basis of SBS reporter Karen Middleton’s question to Kevin Rudd at the National Press Club in Canberra on Monday about environmental analysts’ claims that “the Barrier Reef and the Murray-Darling river system could well be gone by 2020”. Gone where?
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Deal done
Andrew Bolt
What’s the difference between blackmail and a man accepting money in exchange for not releasing embarrassing footage he’s selling of a TV star on a bender?
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Shaheen replies
Andrew Bolt
Yesterday I linked to a report on Shaheen Hasmat, the Afghan refugee who arrived here five years ago with little English, but this week got a near-perfect score in his VCE. Many of you, like me, were thrilled for him and pleased he was one of us.

Shaheen now replies, both to those many who praised him and to the few less generous. I think you’ll like him even more:

Hello everyone, this is me Shaheen Hasmat. I would like to thank all of you for commenting.
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PM cuts truly, madly, deeply
Andrew Bolt
THEY are wrong, both those spitting “sell-out” at Kevin Rudd and those trying to defend his mad emissions policy.

You are about to be hurt much, much more than either say.

What no one has pointed out is that the Rudd Government is imposing on Australia the deepest cuts on greenhouse gases of any country in the world, bar possibly Britain.

Ignore the headlines declaring “5 per cent!” Rudd is in fact forcing each of us to cut our gases by a third by 2020 to set an example to a world that refuses to follow.

So thanks to Rudd, we are out on our own with the toughest scheme in the world, which - if delivered - means you will not only lose money, but perhaps also your job. Even Rudd himself admits the economy will slow.

And all of this is to achieve cuts that amount to only 0.075 per cent of the world’s emissions, at best, and just when the world has actually cooled for six years, and sea levels fallen for two.
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Tell ‘em you’re an artist
Andrew Bolt
SPOT the difference. One man takes photographs of children aged from two to 12, paddling clothed in a pond at Darling Harbour.

The other man takes pictures of a 12-year-old, posed with breasts bared.

The first man is Jason Donald Cotter, a homeless bartender who on Monday was ordered to stand trial in Sydney next year for child pornography.

The second is Bill Henson, who, far from being charged, was this year defended by the leaders of our arts caste as one of our greatest artists.
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I work so they play
Andrew Bolt
Gee, I’m so pleased that the taxes taken from me by Kevin Rudd have been spent on the slackjawed poor:

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd’s $10.4 billion economic stimulus package for families has helped fuel a pre-Christmas video game bonanza.

The latest official sales figures covering the five weeks to December 6 show the games market is up 39 per cent on the same period last year.
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Kevin Rudd: global warming denier
Andrew Bolt
Clive Hamilton adds Kevin Rudd to Tim Blair’s list:

WHEN Kevin Rudd told Kerry O’Brien last week that he would not be caving in to the “extreme environmentalists”, he was not just defining a “moderate” space to occupy, but casting doubt on the climate science.
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Hot heads
Andrew Bolt
What is it with the Left that it tends to get so aggressive, so foot-stamping and so ridiculous when it doesn’t get its way. A totalitarian streak? An inherent childishness? Irresponsibility? A lack of a sense of humor?
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Greer hurts Luhrmann more than she knows
Andrew Bolt
Germaine Greer whacks Baz Luhrmann’s Australia for its crimes against history.
The hero, played by Hugh Jackman, is a drover, whose job is to collect cattle from the stations and drive them wherever they have to go. For the film to work at all we are required to believe that he is ostracised by his peers, simply because, years before the film begins, before the 1914-18 war, he married an Aboriginal woman, who, obligingly, died childless. The most respected drover of central Australia in this era was Matt Savage, otherwise known as “Boss Drover”, a white man whose marriage to an Aboriginal woman lasted 40 years and produced many children who rode with their father. In case that should sound romantic, Savage was known to say, “I got her young, and treated her rough, and she thrived on it.” Savage would have been considered beyond the pale by some, but not by the drinkers in a bar on the Darwin waterfront...

Pardon? The real-life character that Jackman’s Drover most resembles had Aboriginal children that were not stolen? And far from being ostracised, he was “respected”?

Pity that Greer is so wilfully blind to the significance of her own trump card. She’s actually hurt Lurhmann more than she realised, or probably wanted.
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Pat’s black
Andrew Bolt
The Sydney Morning Herald reports a protest against Kevin Rudd
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Do seven make a trend?
Andrew Bolt
Complete surprise, of course:

THE Royal Australian Navy today intercepted the seventh boatload of suspected asylum-seekers in Australian waters since the Rudd Government softened the immigration regime this year.

The interception, which reignites the debate over Kevin Rudd’s claim there is no surge in unauthorised vessels this year, follows the navy’s decision last week to boost patrols in the region.