Headlines Saturday 4th April 2009

Thirteen feared killed in NY gun rampage
A gunman has opened fire at an immigration services centre in New York, killing as many as 13 people before authorities found him dead, officials said.

Liu gave Fitzgibbon political donations
Wealthy Chinese-born businesswoman Helen Liu has given Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon at least $40,000 in direct political donations.

Police raid and arrest Hells Angel
A 38 year old Hell's Angel's bikie member has been charged as part of Strike Force Raptor.

ASIO 'fails airport security overhaul'
ASIO has failed to undertake a complete security overhaul of Australia's main airports, leaving them as susceptible as ever to terrorism assaults.

PM Rudd set to frame budget next week
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will begin framing a budget next week based on the prospect of a world recovery next year after the successful conclusion of the G20 summit in London.

Prison escapee back in Vic hospital
A dangerous prisoner serving time for attempted murder who escaped a high security psychiatric hospital has returned to the facility without incident, police say.

Worker dies at NSW coal mine
A man has died at a NSW coal mine after suffering head injuries from a reported machinery accident....

NSW petrol spill sees thirty evacuated
More than 30 people have been evacuated from their homes after thousands of litres of petrol......
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FLY THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES
Tim Blair
Kevin Rudd’s air rage has been brewing for some time. Laurie Oakes tracks events:
This column can reveal the Prime Minister has been involved in a long-running spat with No.34 Squadron which operates the VIP flights.

“He has issues with them and they have issues with him,’’ a source said yesterday.
That’s just what we need; a Prime Minister who sweats the small stuff. By the sounds of it, his flight staff are teasing Rudd:
The PM would ask for a cup of tea and a flight attendant would arrive carrying a glass of orange juice.

Rudd would be engaged in an important in-flight ministerial meeting and a RAAF staffer would enter the cabin and interrupt the discussion.

Rudd does not handle this sort of thing well.
All hail the men and women of 34 Squadron! They’ve had it with Kev:
There was resentment over repeated cancellations of flights at the last minute, or long periods spent waiting on the tarmac for the No.1 VIP to turn up.

A source said yesterday: “It became war.’’
You’d think a former diplomat would easily be able to solve this minor dispute. But no:
According to a Rudd admirer who has few illusions: “He just doesn’t have a good bedside manner. You would never employ him in a job in human resources.’’
He is employed in a job in human resources. Still, Rudd’s better than the ALP’s previous leader.
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MAYBE THE LAST 39 YEARS HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT
Tim Blair
Australian-born lawyer and everything-knower Geoffrey Robertson (a longtime London resident) offers a fascinating explanation for that fancy voice of his, as Jeffrey James reports:
If you’ve ever wondered about Geoffrey Robertson’s accent (presently rated at 9 1/2 plums out of a possible score of 10), the lawyer, Hypotheticals host and unflappable advocate of bouffants this week laid the credit-blame (delete one) for it on listening to the ABC when he was growing up in the Sydney suburb of Epping.
That explains why everyone else in his age group who listened to the ABC sounds exactly as Robertson does.
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BILL OF RIGHTS
Tim Blair
An editorial in this morning’s Australian:
Last week, Bill Leak’s editorial cartoon in The Weekend Australian offended some readers. To compound the offence, here it is again.

This is not done to dismiss critics’ concerns. We accept that Leak’s work often upsets people … he is certainly subject to the censorious tut-tutting of people who believe that people like them are off limits for lampooning. For years, Leak made fun of the follies and foibles of John Howard, to laughter and applause from the cultural establishment – writers and broadcasters from the ABC and Fairfax newspapers – plus their fellow travellers in the blogosphere. But now that Leak is laughing at Kevin Rudd, today’s darling of the Left, all of a sudden his cartoons are in bad taste.
Note that Bill was alert to this several days before the full extent of Kevin’s G20 krawling.
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RELIGION EVOLVES
Tim Blair
David Penberthy reports:
In welcoming our Prime Minister to St Paul’s Cathedral, Bishop of London Richard Chartres added a new ritual to the liturgy: not the jangling of the incense but the blowing of smoke up the arse.
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NATURAL BALANCE
Tim Blair
The endangered eat the protected:
Conservationists are in a fix over endangered condors eating large numbers of protected species of deer in a reserve in the north of China.
Solution: introduce polar bears to the mix. It’ll probably work.
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VALUES REMAIN
Tim Blair
Trend-wise, we keep trending away from deep-greenism:
“Absolutely the GFC (global financial crisis) has accelerated a decline in interest in environmentalism that was already going on,” [social analyst David] Chalke said. “Environmentalism has been in decline among the Australian public for the last five or six years.

“The notion that we’re all becoming more environmentally concerned is not true. We get concerned occasionally when (global warming activist) Tim Flannery tells us we’re all going to die – but it’s not a genuine fundamental shift in values.”
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'Jeeves' joins exodus from Kevin Rudd's staff
Steve Lewis, Ian McPhedran and Laurie Oakes
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd's short fuse and unreasonable demands have triggered an exodus of personal staff and a backlash from public servants.

His staff turnover is about to reach 16, or one a month since winning office, with the latest casualty being $78,000-a-year former butler John Fisher, dubbed "Jeeves" by the Opposition.

"Jeeves" will join a raft of advisers, secretaries and assistants to leave the turbulent Prime Minister's office since his November 2007 victory.
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DOUBTS DISPELLED
Tim Blair
“If you still have any lingering doubts about global warming,” warned 60 Minutes in 2007, “stick around. We’re off to the Arctic, where Tara Brown found all the proof she needed that there’s something drastically wrong with the world’s weather. It came in the shape of a very large, very hungry polar bear – an angry predator, with us as its prey … as global temperatures rise, the ice cap melts and the polar bears’ hunting grounds disappear. Now they’re starving, desperate for food – so desperate even humans look appetising.”

We mocked Tara at the time, but evidence has since emerged of warming-related poley bear human-munching. Graphic and sickening evidence.
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RUDD STUNNED
Tim Blair
Check Kevin Rudd’s reaction when Barack Obama describes Brazilian president Lula da Silva as “the most popular politician on earth.”

And listen carefully for Rudd’s verbal comeback.

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SCREENS ALIVE
Tim Blair
Barack Obama’s screeny friends are now called officials:
Accompanying the party will be a total of 500 officials including kitchen staff, 35 vehicles in all, four speech writers and 12 teleprompters.
They’ve received the gift of life. Good for them.

- Do you ever wonder if we will ever find proof of intelligent teleprompters on other planets? - ed.
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A G20 deal about nothing
Andrew Bolt
After all the self-congratulation about the G20 triumph, let’s check what was actually achieved by this Seinfeld success.
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How we forgot to save
Andrew Bolt
Always one of the more thoughtful Liberals, and now sadly underused - even dispirited:

THE Howard Government came to believe in “magic pudding” economics of lower taxes and increased spending during its last years in office, Tony Abbott says…

“The fact we could have lower taxes, higher spending and bigger surpluses for about five years - in other words, we could have a magic pudding - led some people to think that thrift, prudence, responsibility had somehow become irrelevant,” Mr Abbott said in a documentary ... to air on ABC Radio National tomorrow morning.

“It’s never irrelevant, and I fear that we’re somehow going to discover just how relevant those old fashioned economic virtues are in the next few years.”

I do suspect, though, that Abbott has been misrepresented slightly by the Sydney Morning Herald. I think he was saying the public, rather than specifically his party, came to believe in “magic pudding” economics.
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Conservative journalists under the red bed
Andrew Bolt
Here’s an analyst rather short of analysis:

China analyst Professor David Goodman, of Sydney University ... rated Turnbull’s attack (on the Rudd Government’s China links) effective because of ”a beat-up by Coalition-leaning journalists”, and Rudd’s fearfulness stoked by “the fact that there’s still a quiet racism, especially in the Labor Party”.

Er, how many “Coalition-leaning journalists” can Goodman actually name, and to what does he owe the astonishing influence of this endangered species given it is outnumbered so badly? His beating of the racist drum as well suggests we have here a man in search of a conspiracy to explain away an inconvenient truth.
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Reaching for the stars
Andrew Bolt
Why is French President Nicolas Sarkozy standing on his tiptoes in posing for this picture (at bottom) with Barack Obama and their wives? - more pertinently, why is Obama relegated to a handshake? - ed.
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The March of cool facts
Andrew Bolt
Dr Roy Spencer checks February’s data from NASA’s Aqua satellite - and, nope, still not sign of any warming since 2002:
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NSW sick
Andrew Bolt
It’s actually not clear to me that the hospital itself failed, but this will for many still be a powerful symbol of the decline of the NSW health system:

A WOMAN gave birth to a stillborn baby in the toilets of Bankstown Hospital after being told by two doctors that she was just constipated… It is the fourth time a woman has lost a child in a NSW hospital toilet since September 2007.
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Prime Minister rude
Andrew Bolt
This constant and intolerable berating of staff indicates to me a narcissistic personality:

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd’s short fuse and unreasonable demands have triggered an exodus of personal staff and a backlash from public servants. His staff turnover is about to reach 16, or one a month since winning office, with the latest casualty being $78,000-a-year former butler John Fisher, dubbed “Jeeves” by the Opposition.

Might not a man like this think nothing of sacrificing the country’s interests to his personal ambition?

UPDATE

Kevin Rudd’s newest secretary gets a call…

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Better Bruno than Borat?
Andrew Bolt
I thought Borat was cruel. Still, I doubt I’ll be able to resist watching Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest movie:

UPDATE

New link added, after original clip removed from YouTube. Warning: content unsuitable for minors, and good Christians and Muslims, too.
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Reds indeed under beds
Andrew Bolt
No, it’s not racist – as the Rudd Government this week disgracefully suggested – to worry about Chinese spying:

CHINESE spies have directly targeted Kevin Rudd, repeatedly attempting to infiltrate prime ministerial email and mobile phone communications.

The Australian understands Mr Rudd and his travelling party were under constant cyber attack during his latest trip to China, in August last year, with authorities trying to access the laptop computers and mobile phones used by the Australians. The blatant nature of Beijing’s electronic espionage is understood to have alarmed the Rudd Government and led to a further tightening of communications security procedures for senior government figures travelling to China.

Intelligence sources said Beijing had also made repeated attempts to break into government and business IT networks, as well as foreign embassies based in Canberra.

But more suspicious than the spying is the apparent leaking that seems to have generated this article. I’m guessing the Government is now trying to seem tough on spies – even of the Chinese variety. Spin, spin, spin..
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A bow to the tyrant
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama makes clear the new world order. He greets the Queen of democratic, Christian England with a nod:

He greets the King of undemocratic, Islamic Saudi Arabia with a deep bow:

UPDATE

Mark Steyn:

So let me see if I understand American protocol in the age of Obama: The First Lady hugs Queen Elizabeth as if she’s some granny at a seniors’ center photo-op, but the President of this republic prostrates himself before King Abdullah as if he’s a subject of the Saudi pseudo-Crown. This is a very weird presidency.

I think it’s more serious than that.

UPDATE 2

How will Richard Quest (from the Left-preaching CNN) now interpret Obama’s bow to King Abdullah, after his praise in that first clip for Obama’s nod to Queen Elizabeth:

So not so much a full-scale bow but certainly an acknowledgement of two equal heads of state saying hello.

Stand by for Quest to draw the logical conclusion from Obama’s deep and unreturned bow to Abdullah. Any minute now.
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Hugs and cringes
Andrew Bolt

In how many ways is this cringe-making - from the matey hug of a stranger who’s no mate, to the prune-face response to Obama’s compliment of someone else, to the bizarre qualification of Obama’s remark (currying favor?), to the lack of any real interest from the others in this Zelig-like creature. I remain astonished that so many voters rate this man as sincere, serious and of substance.
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Governor General of the world
Andrew Bolt
Reader Joe is puzzled that a Governor General of Australia spends so much time talking to people in other countries instead. Go through her diary:
Quentin Bryce

Sworn in:

5/09/08

Time in office:

7 months (213 days)

Trips:
Africa (nine countries) - 16/03/2009 to 3/04/2009 - 19 days

Singapore, UAE, Afghanistan - 17/01/2009 to 23/01/2009 - 7 days

East Timor - 14/12/2008 to 16/12/2008 - 3 days

France, Malta, Singapore - 5/11/2008 to 18/11/2008 - 14 days

Total time overseas so far:

43 days

Percentage of time in office spent overseas:

20

Now compare with her predecessor:
Major General Michael Jeffery

Sworn in:

23/06/2003
Trips in first seven months:

None

The Governor General is travelling abroad more than another Governor General before her, and at the request of a Prime Minister who is travelling abroad more than probably any new Prime Minister before him. To me this confirms that our foreign policy - and our Governor General - are being misused to further not the interests of Australians but the future post-politics career of a Prime Minister with United Nations ambitions. For that, Rudd will need to impress China, Africa and the Middle East, and show he’s of the Left and a committed multilateralist, on board all the issues that make the multilateralists powerful - notably global warming. No wonder he’s asked Bryce to spend so much time in Africa and the Middle East.

Click, click, click. Watch Rudd turn his time as our PM into one great audition for a UN job. And watch him turn the all-too-willing Governor General into a mere prop for his personal ambitions.
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Rudd put in his place
Andrew Bolt
Peter Wilson still isn’t buying the spin:

The Prime Minister is delighted that the shift from a cosy G8 of only the richest nations to a more democratic and diverse G20 has given Australia “a seat at the table” in reshaping the world’s economy, but he could not have guessed what an ordinary seat he would end up with. Rudd was seated last night between Ethiopia and Spain - in other words, in Siberia.

UPDATE

Michael Stutchbury meanwhile unspins the G20 agreement. It’s a Seinfeld one - an agreement about nothing.