Headlines Sunday 15th March 2009

Ides of March special. Where am I supposed to be? Historical note, the Australian Senate was debating euthanasia on this day, about 14 years ago. The senate was practicing it a few thousand years before.

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Pauline Hanson nude photographs emerge from old cancer suffering boyfriend
Pauline Hanson's old boyfriend has sold racy pictures of the then 19 year old to the media. - It's for a worthy cause. Let's hope it stops her from being elected .. or getting paid for campaigning. - ed.
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We are winning the battle of the slick: Qld Govt begs the electorate to understand
The Queensland government says the battle is being won against the massive oil slick which could be the worst environmental disaster in the state's history.
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Iraq wheat exports a boost for Australia
The ramping up of wheat exports to Iraq is a boon for Australian agriculture, the federal government says. - but Rudd promised to remove that last colonel. - ed.
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Woman killed by lightning strike
A 39-year-old mother has died after being hit by lightning at a country Victorian pony club.
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Body found in surf at South Wollongong
A man's body has been found in surf off South Wollongong Beach yesterday by a member of the public.
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Drive-by shooter still at large
Doctor owed $1 million from NSW Government
Gangs petrol bomb police in N.Ireland
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Exposing the myths of Aboriginal history
Piers Akerman
FOR decades, the shrill voices of the Left have dominated the culture wars with cries of “revisionism” whenever historians attempted to put facts before faith in arguments about the so-called Stolen Generation of Aboriginal Australians. - I only recently found out about my ancestry. I have more work to do. I have Aboriginal ancestry, but not heritage. The reason being that my great grandfather separated from his wife, who died soon after, circa 1901 and left the children in foster care before committing suicide. His son claimed to have lost an eye at gallipolli, but many of my family believe it was actually lost in a bar room brawl. On disability for the rest of his life, and a war pension, he could afford to get drunk.
Mother claimed grandfather had raped her and her sisters, when they were growing up. Two of her three sisters suicided, one in middle age, the other elderly.
The aboriginality of my family was not known at the time. None were stolen .. or protected.
I give praise to those in times past who sought to help the needy. They did a brave and good thing. I can’t say the same for the politically motivated ATSIC. For me, history begins at home .. and many people are standing up for lies. Time for the ALP to go. - ed.
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THERE IS NO ESCAPE
Tim Blair
Automated phone-answering services are apparently even more annoying if you’re deaf, which is slightly surprising.
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FUTURE SEEN
Tim Blair
Not even Mad Max can elude Google Street View:
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DEFENDING HUMAN RIGHTS IN DIFFERENT PLACES
Tim Blair
A Californian tree activist is seriously hurt in the Middle East:
An Oakland man who was among the tree-sitters who fought to save a grove of oaks and redwoods next to UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium was critically wounded Friday in the West Bank by an Israeli-fired tear-gas canister, officials and acquaintances said.

Tristan Anderson, 38, was injured during a protest over the separation barrier that Israel erected between it and the West Bank. An Israeli soldier fired the canister during a clash with protesters and hit Anderson in the head, said Ulrika Jenson of Sweden, an activist with the International Solidarity Movement …
Anderson’s girlfriend, Gabrielle Silverman, 25, was keeping a vigil at the hospital, group members said …

The couple went to Israel because they are “concerned about human-rights violations,” [co-founder of the Berkeley chapter of the International Solidarity Movement Paul] Larudee said. “They are involved in defending human rights in many different places. They just felt compelled to do that in Palestine.”
Judging by the tone of this and other reports about Anderson’s injuries, he’ll be lucky to survive, which is sad. Yet if he and his friends feel compelled to defend human rights in this region, why not go to where the majority of alleged abuses are taking place?
“In 2007, the death toll of Palestinians killed by Fatah or Hamas exceeded for the first time the number of Palestinians killed in clashes with the Israeli occupation forces,” said Hamdi Shaqqura, director of the democratic development unit at Gaza’s Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
Read the whole thing, by the SMH’s Jason Koutsoukis.
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ONE HEARTBEAT AWAY
Tim Blair
Vice President Stumble J. Hairplug chats with a colleague:
At an event at Union Station today where Vice President Joe Biden was heralding the $1.3 billion in investments in rebuilding train stations and passenger rails, a microphone picked up one of the former senator’s myriad Senate colleagues addressing him, formally, as “Mr. Vice President.”

That met with Vice President Biden’s standard reply.

“Gimme a f*&$#ing break,” he said, apparently unaware that the microphone was on.
Hey, it’s Joe Biden we’re talking about. Maybe he doesn’t know what a microphone is.

UPDATE. Free-speechin’ Biden types are hauled away by the man:
Using the “F-word” in public places is starting to get Houston-area residents handcuffed or arrested.

For the second time within the past eight months, a person using the word during private conversations in public places — once at a Wal-Mart in La Marque and then at a Mexican restaurant in Galveston — have been taken into custody and cited for disorderly conduct.
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WORD MUST BE USED
Tim Blair
In other history-changing news, The Economist puts John Kerry in the White House:
For all Europe’s Obamamania Mr Obama is, in fact, one of the least European-minded of American presidents. JFK studied at the London School of Economics with Harold Laski, a leading British socialist. Bill Clinton went to Oxford University and surrounded himself with Rhodes scholars who liked to discuss the German educational model. John Kerry was famously not just French-speaking but also “French-looking.”
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A carbon conundrum for Obama:
Barack Obama faces a “revolution” if he imposes emission cuts on the US similar to those set in Europe, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has conceded …

He said political constraints such as creating new jobs made it impossible for the new president to announce the measures that scientists believe are necessary.
Impossible? No way. Just add more magical hopeychangitude.
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Labor’s grip loosened in Queensland
Andrew Bolt
Queensland lurching back to the Coalition:

The Galaxy poll published in the Sunday Mail newspaper shows the LNP has a two-point advantage on a two-party preferred basis. The paper says this is handy after three weeks of campaigning but not enough to gain the 22 seats needed to govern outright… Galaxy principal David Briggs said the two-point lead represents a 5.9 per cent swing to the LNP.
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A debate of 1000 yesses
Andrew Bolt
The Courier Mail’s green blogger advertises a ”debate” on global warming:
On Tuesday evening in Brisbane (17 March) , the Courier-Mail is hosting a free debate on the issue as part of the city’s build-up to the Ideas Festival. The event takes place at the Griffith University Eco Centre between 6.30pm and 8pm. The panelists looking to stir the debate are Profesor Brendan Gleeson (Director of the host university’s Urban Research Program) Jelenko Dragisic (General Manager Volunteering Queensland), Dr Joel Gilmore (energy analyst, ROAM Consulting), Rowan Gray (North Brisbane Carbon Reduction Action Group) and someone else that runs a blog.
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Laughed until they died
Andrew Bolt
Daniel Finkelstein compiles ”The 10 best clips on Middle Eastern TV” - with links to each:

1) Saudi cleric: Mickey Mouse must die!

2) Luckily the Jews took care of him

3) A children’s teddy bear pledges to join the Mujahedeen

4) The tragic martyrdom of the Hamas bunny

5) Tom and Jerry: the international Jewish conspiracy

6) Kill the Danes, says the Hamas bunny

7) Jurassic Park: another international Jewish conspiracy

8) Kuwaiti TV: Homosexuals should be tortured in public squares

9) Dial 113 and turn in your brother:

10) Harry Potter and the Ziono-Hollywoodists

Funny, until you realise this stuff is being pumped out in deadly earnest, especially to children.
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What’s he got?
Andrew Bolt
Get the feeling the neophyte president is being tested? Here’s Russia:

Russia expressed interest in using Cuban airfields during patrol missions of its strategic bombers, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.

“There are four or five airfields in Cuba with 4,000-meter-long runways, which absolutely suit us,” Maj. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev told Interfax. Zhikharev, who is the chief of staff of the Russian Air Force’s long-range aviation, said, “If the two chiefs of state display such a political will, we are ready to fly there.”

Zhikharev also told Interfax that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has offered a military airfield on La Orchila island as a temporary base for Russian strategic bombers.

Here’s China:

A POTENTIAL conflict was looming in the South China Sea last night after President Barack Obama sent heavily armed destroyers to the scene of the naval standoff between the US and China at the weekend. Mr Obama’s decision to send an armed escort for US surveillance ships in the area follows aggressive and co-ordinated manoeuvres by five Chinese vessels on Sunday. They harassed and nearly collided with an unarmed US ship.
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Icing the hype
Andrew Bolt
The ABC accepts - without question - the word of a green alarmist that the world is both heating and drowning:


BARBARA MILLER: Just two years ago the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a worst case scenario, sea levels could rise by up to 59 centimetres by 2100. New information has now led to that figure being revised significantly upwards to a projected rise of a metre or even 1.2 metres. Dr Will Steffen the executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University is at the summit in Copenhagen.

WILL STEFFEN: The 59 centimetres did not take into account the changes of the big polar ice sheets like Greenland and west Antarctica because they couldn’t be modelled very well at that time. We now have better information on how Greenland and west Antarctica, the polar ice sheets are behaving, and they’re leading us to believe that sea level rise will indeed be more than that 59 centimetres.

But here’s what the same conference was also told about Greenland - but which the ABC didn’t report:

The giant Greenland ice sheet may be more resistant to temperature rise than experts realised. The finding gives hope that the worst impacts of global warming, such as the devastating floods depicted in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, could yet be avoided.

Jonathan Bamber, an ice sheet expert at the University of Bristol, told the conference that previous studies had misjudged the so-called Greenland tipping point, at which the ice sheet is certain to melt completely… “We found that the threshold is about double what was previously published,” Bamber told the Copenhagen Climate Congress...

And what of the actual observations of this reputedly fast-warming, fast-drowning climate?

In fact, sea levels haven’t risen for the past two years.

Temperatures haven’t risen for the past decade.

Hurricanes and cyclones have been decreasing in total energy.

Greenland hasn’t been following Europe’s warming trend.

And while the ABC subcontracts its reporting of an alarmist conference to alarmist scientists and activists, it virtually ignores another conference of sceptical scientists and other experts running at the very same time.

Is there a reason that so many reporters refuse to tempter their alarmist reports with cool facts based not on predictions but on observations?

PS

When the wildest predictions at the IPCC conference are for sea level rises this century of up to 1.2 metres, will ABC science guru Robyn Williams concede at last that his own claims of sea level rises of up to 100 metres were grossly alamist and hyperbolic, with no basis in science? When will Media Watch pounce on a science journalist that can insist on something so preposterous?
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Save the planet! Don’t breed!
Andrew Bolt
A new paper by Oregon State University scientists, lucky to still find enough peers to review:

Here we estimate the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual causes when he or she chooses to have children. The summed emissions of a person’s descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-today activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment.
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Picture if Israelis had done this
Andrew Bolt
Jason Koutsoukis reports on the murder of Hamza al-Shoubaki:
His fate is a chilling example of the terror inflicted on dissenters who have lived under the Hamas regime in Gaza since June 2007.

“In 2007, the death toll of Palestinians killed by Fatah or Hamas exceeded for the first time the number of Palestinians killed in clashes with the Israeli occupation forces,” said Hamdi Shaqqura from the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

According to figures cited by Mr Shaqqura, 394 Palestinians were killed in clashes with the Israeli military and security forces in 2007, but at least 500 were killed by forces aligned with either Fatah or Hamas.

For some bizarre reason, Koutsoukis’s report on the reality of a regime tacitly backed by so many of the Left is illustrated by The Age with a picture that carries this caption:

Schoolgirls climb on the ruins of a building destroyed during January’s Israeli offensive in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip.
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Rudd lurches Left, Right alarmed
Andrew Bolt
Chrisopher Pearson:

THERE are a number of reasons on offer as to why the Rudd Government is increasingly looking like a one-term wonder. The most often advanced are the international credit crisis and Rudd Labor’s less than convincing local response to it. At least as compelling, to my mind, is the unforced error that last week saw the federal Government alienate en masse the evangelical Christian constituency by reversing a policy prohibiting foreign aid being spent on abortions in the Third World.

Shortly after the 2007 elections John Black, who is now a demographer but was formerly an ALP senator, came out with a staggering regression analysis on the federal vote. He found: “While white-collar workers provided the grunt with the national swing, the religious activists provided the key seats.” This was especially true in marginal and regional seats in Queensland…

Even before the Nationals’ senator Ron Boswell leapt into the fray, Labor’s own Joe de Bruyn from the shop assistants’ union denounced the move as a disgrace. Noting that it was being sold as a majority view within caucus, to which Rudd was said to be personally opposed, he drew an immediate and unflattering comparison between Rudd’s half-heartedness and Howard’s version of conviction politics…

Jim Wallace, the former commander of the Special Air Service who now heads the Australian Christian Lobby, ... says he and the evangelical Christian constituency felt betrayed both by Rudd and the federal caucus and undertook to campaign on the issue at the next election.

Peter van Onselen thinks de Bruyn isn’t the only powerbroker of Labor’s Right alarmed by Kevin Rudd:

Some of the more ideological members of the Right are concerned Rudd is too swayed by the leftist tendencies of the senior ministers around him. Such references are directed at the likes of Gillard, Lindsay Tanner and, in particular, Carr.

Right-wing MPs worry Rudd’s article in The Monthly signals a serious drift away from the principles that shaped his pre-parliamentary career as premier Wayne Goss’s hard man in Queensland in the reforming days of the 1990s. If Rudd recognises the threat a Gillard-Shorten alliance poses in the years ahead, he just might rethink the extent to which he has been acquiescing to the Left on policy and realign his approach with his more traditional base, the Right.