Headlines Wednesday 3rd December

Possums not fried
Andrew Bolt
You are being misled by alarmists:

SCIENTISTS say a white possum native to Queensland’s Daintree forest has become the first mammal to become extinct due to man-made global warming.
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It’s what Obama would do
Andrew Bolt
It’s the Obama doctrine being played out - by India:

PAKISTAN was bracing last night for a retaliatory airstrike by India against the sprawling headquarters of the al-Qa’ida-linked Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist organisation near Lahore.
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The shame of Australia
Andrew Bolt
BAZ Luhrmann’s first big mistake was to get so full of himself that he called his movie Australia.

Worse, he then added titles to the beginning and end of his $180 million spectacular to tell viewers his take on our history was historically accurate.

And so a movie that is a huge grab-bag of cliches - a collation of gaudy images pecked from deserted movie sets by an insatiable bowerbird - isn’t just bad storytelling.

It’s also an exercise in bad faith - a movie allegedly about Australia, defining Australia, that’s shot by a man who actually doesn’t understand the country, and doesn’t like it, either.

And that lazy contempt is precisely what American critics, for instance, have picked up on. What’s more, fooled by Luhrmann into thinking they really are seeing Australia as we are, they’ve assumed as true that we’re as heart-rotten as he shows.

Hear it from the New York Observer: “Wow, who knew Australia was so racist?”
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Rudd’s jobs reduction scheme
Andrew Bolt
Further proof that at least some in Labor are gagging at Kevin Rudd’s emission trading scheme, realising that slashing emissions actually means slashing jobs:

THE Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has told his backbenchers to hold their nerve over Labor’s emissions trading scheme amid internal concerns about its impact on jobs and intense lobbying by interest groups.

Less than a fortnight before the white paper detailing the scheme is released on December 15, a handful of backbenchers used yesterday’s caucus meeting, the last for the year, to express concern about the impact of the scheme on jobs in difficult economic times.
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Reining in the voters
Andrew Bolt
Announced like it’s a good thing:
Bill of rights to rein in Parliament

A bill to rein in the people we elect to do what we’d wish? With this reining in done by unelected judges? Who’d do anything so undemocratic?
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Why, then, kill the Rabbi?
Andrew Bolt
David Aaronovitch on those on the Left already relativising and explaining away the Mumbai massacre:

There is a branch of apologetics - which I take crudely to be the belief that the crime is the fault of the victim - that assumes a milder form, and which I’ll call explanetics. So the explanatists’ view of the Mumbai massacres last week is that the cause lies in what concretely has been done to, or in the vicinity of, the young, cool-looking men with the grenades and the machineguns.
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Chemical dummies
Andrew Bolt
The easy-fix generation would rather give a child a pill than their care:

UNPUBLISHED figures show that nearly 4000 children under the age of 10 were prescribed anti-depressants last financial year, including 553 children under five and 48 babies…

Leading pediatricians and psychiatrists can offer no reason why infants would be given the drugs.
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Selling out
Andrew Bolt
Is the Opposition now too scared to oppose? It’s already approved, at least initially, the apology, Kyoto, emissions trading, the $10.4 billion spendathon and the unlimited bank guarantee.

Now The Australian protests:

AS The Australian pointed out yesterday, the industrial relations model Julia Gillard took to last year’s ALP conference was so retrograde that Kevin Rudd, after its flaws were exposed by Paul Kelly and others in this newspaper, was forced to step in and moderate it. The Prime Minister must do so again after Kelly’s critique on Saturday showing why the Fair Work bill is a blueprint for pattern bargaining by stealth. If passed, it would return aspects of workplace relations to an unproductive rigidity predating the Hawke-Keating Accord reforms of the 1980s and early 90s.
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As you were in Iraq, soldier
Andrew Bolt
Remember Barack Obama’s vow to pull US troops out of Iraq within 16 months? Now come the caveats that make the promise meaningless, because he sure as hell doesn’t want to lose this peace:

But as I have said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders. And my number one priority is making sure that our troops remain safe in this transition phase and that the Iraqi people are well served by a government that is taking on increased responsibility for its own security.

Spot them? First caveat is that he’ll let his commanders tell him to wait. Second is that he won’t pull out if that exposes his troops to danger. Third is that he must be satisfied that Iraqis won’t suffer by a pullout too premature.

And there’s yet another caveat: his promise applies only to combat troops.