Headlines Sunday 10th May 2009

Charity pays to protect pedophile
ST JOHN Ambulance paid three boys $60,000 each to keep quiet about pedophile abuse.

Man escapes after huge shark rams boat
A FISHERMAN fell into the water fighting off a 4m great white, then watched as his boat motored off.

Voter threat to Rudd's unhealthy Budget
POLLING shows one in three voters will turn on Rudd if he breaks his election health promises in Tuesday's Budget.

Roberta earns big with 'blood money' book
ROBERTA Williams is set to pocket a small fortune from a new tell-all book on her life with gangland killer Carl Williams.

Footy Show star's career in balance
MATTHEW Johns may be without a TV career after an ABC Four Corners report tomorrow night.

Reward to catch crossbow roo attacker
ANIMAL welfare groups are offering a $10,000 reward for information on the crossbow kangaroo attacks in Melbourne.

Gordon Brown embarrassed by expenses exposure
MORE leaked details of items claimed by British politicians on expenses - from chocolate to a sack of horse manure - were published today, piling fresh embarrassment on Gordon Brown's government.
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Labor’s flawed Budget will prove disastrous
Piers Akerman
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd famously promised ``all good things do come to an end’’, as we are being reminded in the ABC’s advertisement for its Tuesday night Budget coverage.
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ARC OF A THOMA
Tim Blair
1969. The highlight of Alaska resident Chip Thoma’s life: he is given a security job at Woodstock and spends the entire concert next to the stage.

1970s-80s. Chip is given several drink-driving tests, which he fails four times over ten years. He spends time in prison following a cocaine conviction.

2009. Chip is giving to complaining about a lemonade stand run by Piper Palin, seven-year-old daughter of Alaska’s governor. He spends most days railing against tourists who want to see the governor’s mansion. Click for Sarah Palin’s brilliant reply.
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INCREASE REGULATION
Tim Blair
The Age‘s Melissa Kent reviews the previous year in Australian film:
Without the success of Baz Luhrmann’s outback epic Australia, last year’s Australian share of the total box office, from films including The Black Balloon, Children of the Silk Road and Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger, would have been at a 30-year low.

Some were out-and-out box-office catastrophes; The Tender Hook, a $7 million jazz-era romance starring A-listers Hugo Weaving, Rose Byrne and Pia Miranda, reaped only $64,000; Gillian Armstrong’s $20 million Harry Houdini drama, Death Defying Acts, took just $713,000.
That’s $27 million invested (much of it from taxpayer grants) for a return of $777,000. This looks like a failure of – what might Kevin Rudd call it? – extreme socialism. Weaving and Byrne’s jazz-era caper was such a debacle that the NSW Film and Television Office declined to fund it, leaving Victorian taxpayers to take the hit. Here’s what they got for their money:
Anachronistic jazz renditions of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan songs heighten the film’s stylised sensibility.
Kent’s piece promises that “Australian film is undergoing a resurgence”. Pray that it is so.
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HE REALLY HATES ORANGES
Tim Blair
“This next disturbing video,” writes Israellycool’s Aussie Dave, “is for those of you who do not believe anti Semitism exists in a place like Perth, Western Australia.” An extraordinary amount of it seems to be contained within one particular idiot:

Weekly Show 2 - "First Fruits"
by QuoTodt

Weekly Show 2 - “First Fruits”
Uploaded by QuoTodt - Watch the latest news videos.

Oranges are just the start. Wait until he learns about the poisonous Jew bananas.

UPDATE. A fan of the fellow above posts an admiring note at Stormfront:
Brandon gets out there in the streets to protest ill gotten Israeli grapefruits. He runs into two Jews, who take his picture without permission. Brandon then confronts them and a heated discussion/argument takes place. The viewer gets a glimpse into HOW our enemies operate.
Apparently they sell grapefruit and take photographs of people who hate Jews. Devious!
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BUSH ADMIN LIVES ON
Tim Blair
No change here:
The Interior Department on Friday let stand a Bush administration policy barring the federal government from using the precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population as a reason to crack down on global warming, upsetting environmentalists and cheering oil and gas companies.
Obama hates bears. In other Obamic developments:
A top White House aide resigned Friday for his role in Air Force One’s $328,835 photo-op flyover above New York City that sparked panic and flashbacks to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The picture was crap, too.
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NATION SWINED
Tim Blair
Our first case:
A NSW woman has tested positive to swine flu, in Australia’s first confirmed case of the illness, Queensland’s chief medical officer says.
As swine illnesses go, it’s not quite the whole hog:
The woman was sick overseas and has made a full recovery, Queensland’s chief health officer Dr Jeannette Young said in a statement on Saturday.

Dr Young said the woman who flew into Brisbane from Los Angeles on Thursday had tested “weak positive’’ to the human swine flu influenza.
Danger level: piglet.
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WERRIBEE MAN
Tim Blair
Some brilliant work back in the old home town:
Driving through a red light turned out to be the least of a Werribee man’s worries when police allegedly discovered he was armed, unlicensed, over the limit and in a car without a bonnet.
The 24-year-old faces one or two charges:
Police charged the man with a variety of offences, including unlicenced driving, drive unregistered vehicle, drive an unroadworthy vehicle, possess controlled weapon, disobey traffic control signal and exceed prescribed concentration of alcohol.
And then there’s this:
When police intercepted the vehicle, the battery powering the car was sitting in the front passenger footwell, beside a full ashtray and a slab of bourbon cans.

In an act of pragmatic stupidity, the bonnet of the car had been removed to allow the conductor leads to travel from the old [battery] inside the vehicle to the new one. The man had a blood-alcohol concentration of .082, police said.
Impressively, Werribee is also home to the Professional Tattooing Association Of Australia.
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REDUCE THE UNCERTAINTY
Tim Blair
Alleged climate exaggerator Tim Flannery – “He believes he needs to go over the top to counter-act the inaction by the federal government” – may be aware that Sydney’s dam levels have declined slightly. Why, Flannery’s famous 2005 prediction is now just 1,523,540,000,000 litres away from coming true! If only the rain would stop.

UPDATE II. Also among previous climate exaggerators, Stanford University’s Stephen Schneider:
We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.
UPDATE III. Money trouble for Australian climate changers. More exaggeration will fix things.
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The eight merchants of fear
Andrew Bolt
Frank Furedi detects eight classes of professisonal panic merchants, from swine flu alarmists to global warming catastrophists:

Today, fear entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are moral crusaders who genuinely believe that the very fabric of society is threatened by evil forces. At the other end of the spectrum are the salespeople and hustlers of the market of fear. It is useful to distinguish between the different species of scaremonger, so here is your ‘Guide To Spotting The Different Actors In The Dramatisation Of Fear’.

Read on. Tellingly, warmists fit into almost every category.
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Rudd spends more to make business even harder
Andrew Bolt
Astonishing. Just when we need more jobs and less debt, the Rudd Government decides to clobber employers with a scheme that will cost plenty:

It is believed the Government has already drafted legislation for the full 18-week paid maternity leave scheme recommended by the Productivity Commission in a big-ticket, budget-night measure that will be sold as a short-term economic stimulant and a long-term reform. The scheme, estimated by the commission to cost about $450 million a year, could begin as early as July 1.

Who on earth would mortgage their assets to become an employer under this government?
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The Jew-hater, and those who feed him
Andrew Bolt

Weekly Show 2 - "First Fruits"
by QuoTodt

The genuine face of anti-Semitism, on our streets. I admire greatly the teenager who stands up to this bigot’s rants and physical threats, but am frightened by the incitement now given by “progressive” writers, broadcasters, publishers, academics, activists and cartoonists - and even by the UN - to such people to demonise Israel and hate Jews.
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Media melting
Andrew Bolt
Another crack, albeit small, in the media ice shelf. This time it’s The Age’s Tony Wright:

Better to be safe than sorry when much of the world’s scientific community says we are sending the planet down the dunny by spewing ridiculous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If we can’t do better than to continue burning the Earth’s fossil fuel deposits when alternatives not only exist, but are being improved at a furious pace, we’re not trying.

Still, it’s hard not to be mildly amused when the cracking up of the Wilkins ice bridge in Antarctica earns worldwide front-page screamers, complete with full-colour pictures from space, while the fact that the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade since the 1970s gets a column on the inside pages. It is as if we WANT to embrace bad news rather than consider that it is not the whole story.
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Panic. Not
Andrew Bolt
I’m terrified:

Australia has its first confirmed case of swine flu.

Or not:

But the NSW woman who arrived in Brisbane on Thursday on flight QF16 from Los Angeles is no longer infectious and had a weak strain of the virus, authorities say. Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the woman, who cannot be identified for privacy reasons, contracted the disease in late April while overseas and had recovered before returning to Australia.

UPDATE

Oh, my God - this is indeed far more serious than I thought. A NSW politician admits that just in her state alone:

we now have 183 deaths in just six months

Oh, wait. We’re talking here not of swine flu, but deaths by medical mistake. No need to worry, then.

Odd fact, though: in just six months, three times more people died in NSW after medical mistakes than have died around the world from swine flu.
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Rudd’s tax on our future
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann says Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme should not be postponed. It should instead be scrapped:

(W)hat has gone largely unremarked is that the postponement makes no sense in terms of the Government’s own rhetoric/beliefs about the economic consequences of the ETS.

The reason for the postponement is our current economic troubles. Yet the Government and its Treasury advisers keep telling us that the sooner we start on the ETS, the better our economy will be. “Green” jobs will sprout like the harvest after the spring rains. The postponement suggests the Government is somewhat less than confident this will prove true…

This goes to the more fundamental issue, and one that Treasury should understand but apparently doesn’t. Why are we one of, if not the biggest, emitters of carbon dioxide per head of population?… It comes from our near total reliance on coal-fired power stations—which gives us the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the world. And, to a lesser extent, our mining and export of minerals, especially coal and iron ore…

In arguably the most extraordinary economic policy decision—based on the most inept policy advice—in our nation’s history, the Rudd Government proposes to attack the industries in which we have our greatest comparative advantage.
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Time to Shatter the Matrix
By Glenn Beck
On the "Glenn Beck" program we try to look at problems and common sense solutions.

There are plenty of problems, but it has been a while since I have been able to honestly say that I see the light at the end of the tunnel. For a while there I've seen nothing but tunnel.

Back when we started the 9/12 Project we said it would come from you — I am not running this, you are. Now, I know how we got in this predicament and how we will get out. And the answer comes from you the 9/12ers — the American people. You are the answer to the economy, the end of corruption and the future of this country will be in your hands once again.

During the election I, along with a lot of other people, looked at the candidates and said "this is it?" I was hoping a there was a politician out there who could give some hope. For a lot of us that was Sarah Palin — I am not saying she should have been president, but she gave me hope that someone is doing it right. That someone gets it. That there's someone to lead us through the tunnel.

Let me put it this way: Remember the movie "The Matrix"? Nothing was real, the world people lived in was a fabrication — a computer program. Our lives have been like that movie and it is not about Barack Obama. It's about Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush. It has been going on for years, it is just a play and it goes back to the progressive movement — on both sides of the aisle.

In the movie the hero is offered two pills: red to learn the truth about the Matrix; blue to go on living blissfully ignorant to what is really going on.

The way to take our country back will short-circuit the Matrix we are living in. And it has to do with gun rights, state's rights and what I call the civilest war.

It is too much to get into now — but next week take the "red pill" and get the truth.