Lismore residents ordered to evacuate as floodwaters rise
An evacuation order has been issued for 5,000 residents of Lismore as NSW's north coast continues to be lashed by severe storms.
Flu toll rises, latest case "puzzling"
There has been another swine flu case confirmed in Victoria, but this one has health officials puzzled.
Sex workers fire salvo at charity
The Salvation Army has issued a public apology after a sex worker lobby group labelled one of the charity’s newspaper ads “discriminative”.
Female staffer paid-off over punch ‘not out of ordinary’: Zappia
The Cronulla Sharks board have negotiated their deadline to explain why they paid out a former staffer, allegedly hit by club boss Tony Zappia.
Ten Aussies confirmed with swine flu, virus will spread: authorities
Swine flu is continuing to spread in Australia, with an Adelaide teenager confirmed to have the virus – the 10th case in the country.
Gillard says deficit is the only way to beat recession
We are being told a budget deficit now is the only way to beat the recession. - Gillard claims that having debt now is better than having it later. Apparently she believes the debt fairy will take this debt away sooner because we made it sooner. - ed.
=== Off Beat ===
Kevin Rudd Deficit Dance - Budget
=== Comments ===
GOATS TURBINED
Tim Blair
Weary of killing the airborne, wind turbines are now executing terrestrial creatures.
===
BOOM TIMES
Tim Blair
All the latest on Clare Werbeloff, the “so-called Chk-Chk Boom woman” – including a marketing conspiracy theory.
===
SHAKE DOWN THE RUBES
Tim Blair
The NYT’s solution to its financial woes: selling O-crap.
===
IT’S JUST SO INCREDIBLY SIGNIFICANT
Tim Blair
The Seattle Times:
It’s hard to overstate the significance of the moment.
===
Warming to the hyping of science
Andrew Bolt
It’s the new way of promoting science - and winning grants. Hype it, whether it’s global warming or the finding of a gossil you trumpet as the ”missing link”:
It was the day a fossil of a lemur-like animal that died 47 million years ago was treated like a pop star. Rarely, if ever, has an important scientific discovery been announced with so much hype, touted as a “revolutionary find that will change everything” and “send shock waves around the world”. The ancient primate, dubbed Ida, went from a tightly held secret for more than 25 years to an overnight wonder, with her own website, book, and TV documentary....
But the episode has left the remarkable find mired in controversy, with scientists, rather than the media, criticised for overstating her significance with claims that Ida was “our earliest ancestor”.
“This is a wonderful find,” said the chief executive officer of the Australian Science Media Centre, Susannah Eliott. “But the excessive spin appears to be more about selling a book and a TV program than communicating good science."…
Jorn Hurum, the Norwegian palaeontologist who led the fossil research, has expressed satisfaction with the PR campaign. ”Any pop band is doing the same,” he told The New York Times. “We have to start thinking the same way in science.”
===
Why should Jews support an Einfeld?
Andrew Bolt
Calls by Jews to support Jews who have clearly done wrong - and to support them specificaly because they are Jews - strikes me as not just an offence against reason, but against the best interests of Jews:
FORMER federal minister Barry Cohen has taken the Jewish community to task, claiming it has not supported jailed former judge Marcus Einfeld.
I’d have thought there’s an equally strong argument that Einfeld has betrayed his community, even selfishly dragging his own synagogue into his controversy, and should be made an example of.
Let the watchword word be: virtue above tribe. Rule of law above rule of mates.
===
Be more frank than me
Andrew Bolt
Nazeem Hussain rightly demands police be more frank about racist attacks on Indian students. But, since he’s writing in The Age, he does not dare be frank himself and name (directly) one of the ethnic groups most implicated in these attacks:
What concerns me is that each time an attack against an Indian is reported, Victoria Police has quite determinedly ensured the issue of racism is not closely linked to the crime.
Last week, the Islamic Council of Victoria issued a media release noting that police had “failed to adequately address the cause of the attacks — which is racism”. In response, Superintendent Graham Kent lashed out at the council on 3AW, claiming the police were “disappointed” and that the statement was “uninformed”.
What is uninformed is the assertion by police that the attacks against people of Indian appearance were “based on opportunity, not race"…
Victoria Police has itself claimed that people of Indian background are “over-represented as victims”. When both the victims and the aggressors claim that these attacks are racially motivated, what purpose does it serve to avoid a discussion about racism?.... There is little benefit in denying the existence of racist attitudes in our communities…
This is not to say the multicultural officers in the force are not doing a great job engaging with ethnic communities. But this is not a question of police talking to peak bodies such as the Islamic Council. It’s about the fact that there has been no real, tangible response to this pattern of violent racism.
UPDATE
At least on of the more notorious bashings seems the work of a multi-ethnic gang, however.
===
How to kill 66,000 jobs
Andrew Bolt
Mitch Hooke, head of the Minerals Council of Australia, is amazed the Senate is voting on the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme without knowing how many people will lose their jobs where and when:
While the Government describes its Treasury modelling as the most comprehensive ever attempted, the analysis provides no forecasts on the sectoral or regional employment impacts over the first decade of the CPRS. None at all.... This is economic policy-making with a blindfold on…
So we asked Australia’s most experienced economic forecaster—Brian Fisher—to assess the impact on employment in the sector that produces about 50per cent of Australia’s exports. Fisher—a former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics—used the same Treasury assumptions and the same data sources used in the Treasury modelling. Unlike the Treasury, he took into account the global financial crisis…
The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected… No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared…
You can add to these numbers the jobs of the council workers, the school teachers, the nurses, gardeners, and employees in the hundreds of small businesses in the towns and communities that service these mining regions. Not surprisingly, I consider these numbers should prompt a Government re-think of its CPRS legislation.
===
Rudd’s mad grab for power
Andrew Bolt
KEVIN Rudd won’t even tell you what you already know about his record deficit.
So, no wonder he won’t tell you the truth about what you don’t know about the “largest solar power station in the world” that he vowed this week to build with another $1.36 billion of your money.
As in: it will produce only a fraction of the power Rudd claimed and cost more jobs than he said it would create.
As in: it will give us power more expensive than we can afford, to fix a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
As in: it’s the kind of project that a new study in Spain, now crippled by its own bid to be a world-beater in green power, warns is “terribly economically counterproductive”.
Oh, and as for Rudd’s boast that his will be the world’s “largest” solar project? Yet more of his spin, spin, spin.
You want a symbol of this Government’s mania for spin over substance? Here it is - and one day we’ll wonder how we could have fallen for such fakery.
===
Next time, pack some manners
Andrew Bolt
THERE, that didn’t take much, did it? A guilty plea, a small fine she didn’t even have to pay, and Annice Smoel is back in Melbourne where she belongs.
Face saved all round.
See, Thai police don’t pick on Australian women for mere sport. Their main role in resorts such as Phuket is to make sure tourists come and spend.
So no wonder the Thai Tourism Minister rushed - once 3AW lit a fuse under his chair - to send Smoel back, after she spent almost three weeks waiting to go to court to face a trivial charge of theft. Of which she’s almost certainly innocent.
Of course, there are the tub-thumpers railing that these corrupt Thais should never have laid a hand on this gallant Montrose mum whose friends were just playing a “prank” when they broke off their boozing in Phuket to steal a $60 bar mat, stuffing it in Smoel’s bag.
But attention, Neil Mitchell, who said yesterday on 3AW that the moral was to not even look sideways when travelling in nasty Thailand. Which he’d probably rather not.
===
The best lack all conviction
Andrew Bolt
It is 40 years ago since Lord Kenneth Clark ended his great BBC documentary, Civilisation, with this credo. It rings as true as a great bell, and we can only wish more heard it. I mean, really heard it.
Clark, in finishing, quotes WB Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
===
Food fight
Andrew Bolt
The story of America’s wars since World War 2, told with food. History you can eat.
===
The Obama song
Andrew Bolt
Who can take tomorrow and spend it all todaaaay
Kevin Rudd is just begging for some treatment of this kind.
===
'The Factor' Investigates ACORN
By Bill O'Reilly
In what might be the biggest financial-political con in history, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN, is under "The Factor" microscope.
Who are they? ACORN is a far-left organization that signs up voters, lobbies for the poor and promotes low-income housing.
Who runs them? Up until recently, Wade Rathke and his brother Dale held much power within ACORN. But last year, Dale Rathke was exposed. Apparently he embezzled close to $1 million from the organization. ACORN declined to press charges, a reimbursement deal was struck, and the Rathke brothers resigned, but Wade is still deeply involved. Right now a woman named Bertha Lewis is in charge. She is out of New York City.
How does ACORN get money? Congressman John Boehner says ACORN affiliates in just 11 states have received more than $31 million in taxpayer funding, at least $11 million last year alone.
Also, a variety of ACORN affiliates, like the American Institute for Social Justice, give money directly to the parent organization. Social Justice, for example, has given ACORN more than $7 million in grants. The far-left SEIU, the service workers union, pays ACORN on a regular basis. Recently, ACORN mounted a campaign against Wal-Mart. The SEIU paid them $500,000 to do that.
By the way, former ACORN leader Wade Rathke founded the SEIU in New Orleans. As the church lady once said, how convenient.
So it is obvious that ACORN is a huge money-generating organization. But where does the money go?
"The Factor" and the "Glenn Beck" show traced the money to an address in New Orleans on Elysian Fields Avenue, an old funeral parlor that is being used as a money depot for ACORN and as many as 268 other far-left organizations. The doors were locked when "Factor" producer Dan Bank approached, but he did find an ACORN employee.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAN BANK, "FACTOR" PRODUCER: Excuse me, ma'am? I'm trying to go into the ACORN house. I'm wondering if you know what exactly is going on in there?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, I don't.
BANK: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, you need to take that off of me.
BANK: Do you normally go in there?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't think it's any of your business.
BANK: Well, I have here over 270 organizations that use that as their mailing address for millions of dollars going in. Do you know what that's all about?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, I don't.
BANK: Do you know Wade Rathke?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't need to answer that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
We traced that woman. She is an ACORN employee. Then Dan went over to ACORN's other building on Canal Street:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BANK: I'm looking for a Mr. Wade Rathke. We have some questions about…
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He doesn't work here anymore.
BANK: Do you know why? Was it because his brother embezzled the money? Excuse me. I have some questions about Mr. Wade Rathke. Yeah, I'm wondering where Mr. Wade Rathke is?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is not here.
BANK: Sir, we just have a couple of questions. We just have a couple questions.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) I'm not a manager. And he's not going…
(CROSSTALK)
BANK: Well, we want to know what's going on at Elysian Fields Avenue.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Obviously, ACORN employees were not talking, but they should be talking — to the FBI.
With millions of dollars in play — some of it tax money — we don't know where the money is. We do know that seven ACORN employees were convicted of crimes in Washington state, and a number of other criminal investigations are underway. In Nevada and Pennsylvania, charges against ACORN people have already been brought.
But all of that pales next to the millions of dollars pouring into an old funeral home in New Orleans. Something is very wrong here.
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