Headlines Saturday 7th March 2009

Alan Jones returns to hospital
Prominent radio broadcaster Alan Jones has returned to hospital for surgery and grafts for skin cancer.
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Cops hunt for US gunman who killed five
Police searched for a newlywed suspected of killing his wife, his sister-in-law and three young children in one of Cleveland's most horrific shootings in years.
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Property sales boom in western Sydney
It's been revealed that property sales across western Sydney are booming, despite the financial crisis.
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Pakistan say attackers may be foreign
A top Pakistan official refused to rule out foreign involvement in the Sri Lankan cricket attacks.
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Zimbabwean PM's wife dies after crash
Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's wife Susan has died from injuries she suffered in a car crash in which the prime minister was also hurt.
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Earthquake rocks Melbourne
$110m palace not good enough for wife
Five killed in US shooting spree
Pacific Brands workers walk out
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FOOTWORK PROBLEMS
Tim Blair
It hasn’t been a great week for Peter Roebuck, whose sunny views about travel in Pakistan were undermined slightly by the murders of several police protecting Sri Lankan cricketers. Now comes a Second Test century in South Africa by Macksville boy Phil Hughes, previously condemned by Roebuck:
Phillip Hughes is seemingly such a “flawed” cricketer he should return immediately to his family farm at Macksville and give the game away. Peter Roebuck wrote the following about the 20-year-old lad making his Test debut: “technique has more holes than a colander”, “his game is an unusual hotch-potch”, “he has looked shaky in this match”, “back-foot game needs work” and “main problem lay with his footwork”. Didn’t he top score in Australia’s second innings, making more runs than Katich, Ponting, Hussey, Clarke and North combined?
No big deal; Hughes copes easily with criticism. Meanwhile, here’s how Roebuck describes the slaughter in Lahore:
Evidently the Australians had recovered quickly from the last match and subsequent events … Negativity seemed to overwhelm the hosts. Generous observers put it down to events in Pakistan.
Events. They wreck everything.
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HE SURE CAN
Tim Blair
I’m not the only one making fun of Al Gore during widespread US coldening. Here’s a recent Letterman top ten ("Things Overhead in New York During Today’s Snowstorm"):
4. Gore can go suck it
5. Starbucks is selling something called a Slushachino
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GREEN DEEN MEAN
Tim Blair
British politician Peter Mandelson arrives at a Low Carbon Economy Summit only to be hit in the face by a custard-throwing Green:

Mandelson’s Green attacker, Leila Deen, strolled away from the scene and apparently won’t be taken into, er, custardy: “No complaint has been made about the incident and no action taken against Ms Deen.”
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KOW KOLLEGE KEITH
Tim Blair
Cornell grad Ann Coulter unloads on sorta-kinda fellow Cornell grad Keith Olbermann (the guy who can’t recognise a bogus Murdoch quote when it smacks him in the face):
If you’ve ever watched any three nights of his show, you know that Olbermann went to Cornell. But he always forgets to mention that he went to the school that offers classes in milking and bovine management.

Indeed, Keith is constantly lying about his nonexistent “Ivy League” education, boasting to Playboy magazine, for example: “My Ivy League education taught me how to cut corners, skim books and take an idea and write 15 pages on it, and also how to work all day at the Cornell radio station and never actually go to class.”

Except Keith didn’t go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell.
Olbermann’s response:
Cornell diplomas don’t make any reference to individual college or major. They’re Cornell diplomas.
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WINE DOG
Tim Blair
Billie – this site’s official dog – adds expensive wine to her usual diet:

Note the Billie pillow upon which our favourite dog reclines. Owners Craig and Karen made it from a polar bear.
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WE BE BAD
Tim Blair
Sound advice for conservatives from Stephen Green:
A few years back, television writer/producer/directory/visionary Joss Whedon made a little libertarian-themed science fiction movie called Serenity. In it, our ragtag band of heroes make their way around the ‘verse by trading freely when they can and by stealing from the corrupt, oppressive central government when they must. Before launching a minor raid on a government stash of ill-gotten gold, Jayne, the hired muscle (played with an endearingly ignorant malice by Adam Baldwin), cocks his shotgun menacingly — is there any other way? — and suggests, “Let’s be bad guys.”

Yes. Exactly. Let’s.
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Suicide central
Andrew Bolt
An astonishing statistic:

At least 58 people have committed suicide from the West Gate since 2003.

Why has it taken so long to install suicide barriers?
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Readers sought
Andrew Bolt
A blog post by Crikey editor Jonathan Green from two weeks ago:

Who reads Andrew Bolt anyway? Comments (2)
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Turnbull fisks Rudd
Andrew Bolt
An excellent response to Kevin Rudd’s absurd essay by Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, even if a little late. Some highlights:


While the rest of us were relaxing during the summer, perhaps reading some fiction, our Prime Minister was tapping away, imagining himself battling off communists to the Left, fascists to the Right, clad only in a suit of shining ideological purity.

All of us remember Kevin07, shiny faced and earnest, proclaiming himself an economic conservative. In one television advertisement after another his message to Australians was clear: there wasn’t a cigarette paper’s difference between him and John Howard on economic policy.

Free markets? He loved them. Surpluses? The bigger, the better. Tax? Well, of course it should be lower.

Well, all of that is cast away now. Instead, he preaches social democracy… So in little more than a year, the economic conservative has become a socialist....

If privatisation, deregulation, promotion of competition are symptoms of neo-liberalism then Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, Howard and Peter Costello have a lot in common. And when we look overseas we see the same pattern. Reagan did undertake economic reform in the US, but then so did Bill Clinton....

But if Rudd’s global ideological analysis is at odds with the facts, it becomes even more absurd when he turns to Australia…

First, the proposition that the global financial crisis was caused by wicked neo-liberal governments deregulating their financial markets and “letting the free market rip” is nonsense. At a fundamental level the crisis arose because of too much cheap money being available for too long… The immediate trigger was the collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market in the US beginning in the second half of 2007. Far from being a creature of “unchecked market forces”, the US mortgage market is the subject of extensive Government intervention.

For a start, large government-backed mortgage finance companies, in particular Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, provided between them $7 trillion of low-cost finance to the mortgage market… Fannie and Freddie were using the credit of the US Government to finance a housing bubble. And why was that? As with most governments, the US through administrations of both persuasions has tried to promote home ownership, especially for people on lower incomes…

So there are the facts that demonstrate the delusional nonsense at the core of Rudd’s thesis. In the US a mortgage market in which government played a central and directing role blows up. In Australia, where government’s role is simply to provide an efficient financial and prudential regulatory framework, the mortgage market remains sound…

It is bad enough to have Rudd trying to turn himself, in the blink of an eye, from an adherent of the cautious, responsible economic conservatism of Howard into a slightly more genteel version of a foaming-at-the-mouth radical such as Hugo Chavez… But what are we to think of the wealthiest Prime Minister Australia has ever had, a man greatly enriched by the privatisation and outsourcing of government services, standing up again and again to denounce the very policies from which he and his family have profited so extensively.
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Savers aren’t losers
Andrew Bolt
The astonishing pokie losses in poor suburbs help to explain why some of the poor are poor, and will stay poor even after handouts of free cash.
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Green for get physical
Andrew Bolt
Why is it that whenever you hear of a politician being physically attacked by a protester, you immediately conclude: almost certainly of the Left, and probably a green?
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Obama’s snake oil
Andrew Bolt
Charles Krauthammer on the fundamental deceit of Barack Obama:

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the “$2 trillion dollars in savings” that “we have already identified,” $1.6 trillion of which President Obama’s budget director later admits is the “savings” of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019—11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery… All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred… (W)ith our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
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Three strikes against us
Andrew Bolt
A modern tale of welfare, sexual depravity and family breakdown:

A TEENAGE girl signed a “contract” with her stepfather agreeing to have sex with him so she would become pregnant and keep the child bonus payments.
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Mad not to believe in the Apocalypse
Andrew Bolt

Soon the Warming Inquisition will make it compulsory to be treated for global warming scepticism:

This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse…

University departments, serious authors, think-tanks and radical activists are embracing the ‘psychological disorder’ view of climate change scepticism. At Columbia University in New York, the Global Roundtable on Public Attitudes to Climate Change studies the ‘completely baffling’ response of the public to the threat of climate change, exploring why the public has been ‘so slow to act’ despite the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. Apparently, our slack response is partly a result of our brain’s inability to assess ‘pallid statistical information’ in the face of fear (4). The Ecologist magazine also talks about the ‘psychology of climate change denial’ and says the majority of people (excluding those ‘handfuls of people who have already decided to stop being passive bystanders’: the green elite again) have responded to warnings of global warming by sinking into ‘self-deception and mass denial’ (5).

But who actually sounds maddest? Here is the latest report of the BBC’s “Ethical Man”, who is trying to lead a carbon neutral life:

The most amazing thing I have found in the more than 3 years I’ve been reporting on climate change for the BBC is how unafraid most people seem about it.

The stakes really could not be higher. We are talking about something that could wipe man off the face of the earth, and take out most other species while it’s about it. So, why are we not all convulsed with fear?

Not afraid? Damn you, well try this on for size;

“We’re looking at a scenario where there is no more agriculture in California. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

On the face of it, who really sounds mad: Ethical Man or those who doubt him?
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Keating warns
Andrew Bolt
If Paul Keating is worried by Ruddernomics, you should be alarmed:

Former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating says fiscal stimulus is reaching its limits and even advanced nations are at risk of debt default if they continue to amass huge budget deficits and borrowings to rescue their economies.

“There is a limit to what fiscal policy can do simply because there is a limit to fiscal policy,” Mr Keating told a Lowy Institute gathering in Sydney on Thursday.

“Is this sustainable? Who is going to buy the bonds?”

He cited in particular the huge bill the United States was running up in an effort to counter the recession and to bail out its banking system and strategic companies such as the insurer AIG.

“Is America going to default on its debt or be able to issue bonds?” he asked.
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Let’s sack the other 7000 workers, too
Andrew Bolt
Now Kevin Rudd, desperate to find a greedy-boss scapegoat, wants a refund of $17 million from Pacific Brands that could put at risk some of the very jobs he was trying to save in the first place:

THE Federal Government will try to retrieve taxpayers’ money given to Pacific Brands in view of the company’s decision to slash 1,850 jobs, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Friday…

“I think what Pacific Brands has done is, frankly, in so many respects, beyond the pale,’’ Mr Rudd said. “In terms of the money they have got from the government, we will go through all of that in terms of what can be extracted back from them.’’…

But Pacific Brands insisted it wouldn’t back down, releasing a statement straight after the rally, saying it would be “irresponsible’’ to do so because it would mean another 7,000 jobs would be lost.

This highly cynical and politically driven scapegoating of Pacific Brands, if successful, will cost even more jobs than the company has had to shed to stay alive. And consider this:
Pacific Brands is the only major clothing business still manufacturing in this country.

Many other clothing companies have already fled overseas, not least because unions have helped make business too expensive in Australia. Now Pacific Brands workers are pleading with the public to save them from the boycott being organised by unions to “help” them, too:

PACIFIC Brands workers have urged the public to reject a boycott of the company’s products, saying it would threaten the livelihood of employees lucky enough to keep their jobs.

Former NSW Treasurer Michael Costa is scathing:

The Government’s feigned moral outrage is dangerous. It creates a climate for protectionism. The public is entitled to ask: if you’re so outraged by what appears to be a straightforward commercial decision, why haven’t you taken more decisive action to keep these jobs in Australia? ...

The Government posturing on executive salaries is classic diversionary politics. If you can’t do anything about the job losses, deflect attention elsewhere… The Government at a time of national difficulty should stop being divisive and focus on honest explanations of problems and sound policy rather than political expediency.

As for that whipped-up rage at the CEO’s salary:

THE collapse of Pacific Brands’ share price in the past year could cost chief executive Sue Morphet close to $1 million in payments, a group report shows.
In fact, Ms Morphet’s total pay of $1.86 million for the 12 months to the end of June 2008 was effectively cut last week after she compulsorily acquired 100,774 shares under the company’s executive incentive payment scheme.

So now that Morphett’s pay has been slashed, does this make the sackings OK with the hate-the-rich ranters?

UPDATE

Finally business is standing up to this self-destructive scapegoating:

COMPANY bosses are doing the best they can, and hysterical responses to job cuts help no one, Telstra chairman Donald McGauchie says…

“Populist calls for companies to take a hit on profits to save jobs - while sounding to the tabloid press as being loaded with compassion - is in fact the opposite,’’ Mr McGauchie said… An increasingly prevalent “us versus them’’ mentality, manifesting itself in a call of “bosses are bastards’’, is dangerous in the current climate, Mr McGauchie said.

“What we need now is calm and steady leadership at every level of society,’’ he said.
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Revisiting Rudd’s dud summit
Andrew Bolt

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, perhaps the most impressive performer in the Rudd Government, makes clear his disdain for talkfests when asked whether we need another summit to discuss the financial crisis:

TONY JONES: ... You had a 2020 Summit, and yet this is the biggest crisis the economy has faced.

LINDSAY TANNER: Look, I tend to not be a big fan of summits per se, because I tend to be a fan of doing things.

TONY JONES: Including the other summits.

LINDSAY TANNER: I said “summits per se”, I’ll leave aside the 2020 Summit. I think a lot of valuable discussion did come out of that. I think in these kind of circumstances…

GEOFFREY COUSINS: Could you name just a little of it? Good summit, bad summit.

LINDSAY TANNER: But I can tell you what Peter would be saying. The moment we called a summit he’d be saying, “It’s a talkfest, what about actions?”, and I think if he did, he’d have a certain degree of good sense in what his commentary.

I’m not surprised Tanner is so doubtful of the benefit of such stunts, especially now that we have seen what a farce the 2020 summit was. Check some of the recommendations debated there by Rudd’s handpicked “best and brightest” - 1000 people largely of the Left. What was good was not original, and what was original was not good:

Singer Robyn Archer says a good government “will help build a society that cares deeply about artists”, and she has seen just such a society: “It’s called Cuba.” Its dictators “valued citizens who maintain their voice"…

An ABC reporter says his favourite idea so far is for a giant veranda over our east coast to stop skin cancer. Sky News says someone wants citizenship stripped from all Australians, and given back only to those who are good climate citizens… Louise Adler, the Melbourne University Press boss, says her arts group spent a lot of time discussing whether the blue of their summit ribbons was, erk, Liberal blue.

In fact:

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard is asked to nominate any truly new idea from the summit that ends up mostly backing old Labor ideas. All she mentions is teaching children how to choose a mobile phone package. The Prime Minister is asked the same question. All he can think of is inventing a bionic eye. He later learns it’s already been invented.

Kevin Rudd nevertheless made this promise to his summitteers:

Mr Rudd said the government would now consider the final report before reporting back on whether it would adopt any more summit recommendations by the end of the year.

Rudd’s response to his summit’s “new ideas for Australia’s future” is now more than two months overdue. You’d think if those ideas had been any good, he’d sure need them now. But I guess you always knew that this summit was all about seeming rather than doing.

No wonder Tanner, a largely rational man (who must therefore surely be a secret warming sceptic), is embarrassed now by any suggestion of another summit. And those who participated in last years should now feel they were cast as dupes by Rudd.

UPDATE

Scepticism spreads:

President Obama pulled together dozens of industry professionals and stakeholders to hash out ideas for health care reform—but some question whether such summits yield new proposals. - Tanner is highly lauded as an effective speaker, performer, so I listened with some interest the other day when he was interviewed. The issue of the government talking down the economy was raised and Tanner took an interesting tack. Tanner said that the opposition had been talking down the economy, and so, perhaps, both sides were guilty of that. The assertion was accepted with Tanner’s other arguments by the partisan media.
I follow the Liberal party closely in NSW and Australian circles, and I cannot find an example of Liberals talking down the economy when I filter out Liberals criticizing the ALP governance of the economy.
Tanners argument becomes irritating because no Liberal member would ever be allowed to make such a lazy assertion .. yet Tanner is lauded as the ALP’s most effective performer.
We have Gillard whose sole gift seems to be her capacity to talk into a policy vacuum, making bare policy shelves sound substantial. We have Rudd who bureaucratically avoids any question with stuff and nonsense. We have Swan who runs like a 20 Watt lightbulb .. that is how many times he asks ‘What’ when asked a question. But we don’t have a free and capable press capable of getting the government to improve by asking pertinent questions and demanding appropriate responses.
Joe Hockey is very effective .. but all Joe needs to do to get the government diving into corners looking for excuses, is to ask a simple question. Note how devastating Costello has been from the backbench, so that his statements must be diverted with irrelevant and old leadership issues? Yet again a partisan press strikes for the ALP. - ed.
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This Christ still hunting for 12 disciples
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama’s staffing woes are starting to resemble an episode of the Keystone Cops:

The person Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wanted as his chief deputy has withdrawn from consideration, dealing a setback to the understaffed agency as it struggles to address the worst financial crisis in decades.

Annette Nazareth, a former senior staffer and commissioner with the Securities and Exchange Commission, made “a personal decision” to withdraw from the process, according to a person familiar with her decision.

The decision followed more than a month of intense scrutiny of her taxes and multiple interviews. No tax problems or other issues arose during Nazareth’s vetting, said the person, who requested anonymity because Geithner’s choice of Nazareth was never announced officially.

If true, that would mark a big change from some of Obama’s picks so far.