Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Headlines Wednesday 10th June 2009

Helicopter crashes at Dream World
A helicopter has crashed at the Dream World theme park on the Gold Coast.

Abbott mocks Rudd's sauce bottle shaking
Kevin Rudd's colloquial language is the kind of slang associated with the Barry McKenzie movies of 30 years ago, opposition frontbencher Tony Abbott says.

Police Taser, shoot dead pet chihuahua
A family is outraged after returning home to find police had Tasered and shot dead their pet Chihuahua.

Worker killed in fiery F3 truck crash
A man has been killed after semitrailer ploughed into an RTA grass-cutting crew on the F3, leaving traffic backed up for kilometres.

More racial unrest in Sydney’s west
Another night of unrest has passed in Sydney's West, with Indian residents protesting a lack of police protection from a Middle Eastern gang. Jessica Pelliccione is at Harris Park

Rudd fears cameras pointing elsewhere
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has hailed a rise in business confidence as an early sign of an economic recovery in Australia.

Suicide blast at luxury hotel in Pakistan
Two foreigners were among the 11 people killed Tuesday when a suicide truck bomb hit a luxury hotel in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar, a provincial minister said.

Gordon Ramsay apologises for Tracy Grimshaw rant: report. Rudd temporarily silent
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has apologised for publicly insulting Australian current affairs presenter Tracy Grimshaw.

Lucas Neill echoes Beckham with 'tactical' yellow card
Lucas Neill has barely raised an eyebrow for committing a sin which earned David Beckham condemnation from some of the biggest names in world football.

NSW cleared for AAA rating, rating agency optimistic NSW ALP will lose next election
Mixed news on credit ratings: NSW's is OK at Triple A, for the moment anyway, but Ireland's rating has been cut for the second time in four months as its financial position continues to worsen.

Peter Andre says Katie Price bullied him to a 'shadow' of himself
Peter Andre says his estranged wife Katie Price bullied him until he was a “shadow” of himself.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Who Is Looking Out? President Obama?
What do YOU think?

I have a question for you. Is the fix in? (and if the answer is yes, that is disgraceful.) The US Supreme Court (actually one Justice) has postponed the Chrysler Fiat deal because some pensioners claim they are not getting a fair shake. They are not fat cats, nor do they have lots of people lobbying for them nor are they an organized huge voting block (like unions.) They are some pensioners and are not hugely organized.

With the Chrysler/Fiat deal, are these pensioners getting walked all over? (driven over?) ignored? taken advantage of?
===
He's the nation's most vocal anti-bailout governor...

Now, he's been ordered to accept stimulus aid! So, what's his next move?

Mark Sanford speaks out to Greta, only on 'On the Record'!
=== Comments ===
FACT OF LIFE
Tim Blair
The Age quotes Kevin Rudd on Sydney’s recent intermulticultural violence:
“I think everyone just needs to draw some breath on this and I think we need to see a greater atmosphere of general calm,’’ he told Radio 3AW.
Omitted was a subsequent line from the same interview, broadcast this morning on Nine news:
There are acts of violence every day. That’s just a fact of urban life.
No big deal, then.
===
SHE’S 14, DAVE
Tim Blair
David Letterman has avoided any problem with jokes about Barack Obama by simply persisting with jokes about George Bush and Sarah Palin. It’s as though last year’s election never happened. Here’s his latest:

There’s a problem here.
===
THE PEOPLE’S PRINCESS
Tim Blair
“Have you ever heard Kevin Rudd say ‘mate‘?" a colleague asked yesterday. “He doesn’t say it … properly.” True; Rudd struggles with the tones, inflections and phrasing of broad Australian speech. But bless him for trying:
Sensitive to criticism that his new frontbench line-up had overlooked women in favour of factional heavies, Mr Rudd yesterday dismissed the claims with the Aussie maxim, “fair shake of the sauce bottle mate”.

More curiously, he said it three times during a short television interview with Sky News.
Some trace Rudd’s sauciness to his Sunrise apprenticeship. The Prime Minister had another Ozzified verbal weapon for his Sky audience:
At another stage of the same interview, his normally complex sentences – often derided as techno-babble – gave way to a style commonly used in post-match interviews.

The new Defence Minister Senator John Faulkner, became “Faulks” – a familiarisation not even used inside the ALP.
With that in mind, the following includes PM-approved abbreviations:
The reshuffle attracted criticism for its promotion of men and for the elevation of newcomers connected to factions over some competent, but less well-connected MPs. Promotions included new minister Mark Arbib [Arbs], a powerful figure from the NSW Right faction with less than a year as a senator and SA’s Mark Butler [Butts], an influential Left powerbroker also in his first term in Parliament. Strong performers such as Maxine McKew [Kubes], Amanda Rishworth [Mands] and Melissa Parke [er … Parkes] were overlooked.

At the swearing in, Governor-General Quentin Bryce [Quents] struck a blow for women in the workforce, asking one minister’s wife not to take a crying baby outside during the formal ceremony declaring: “I don’t believe in taking children out of the room”.
So Kevin was allowed to stay. He doesn’t know his Shakes from his Totles, either.
===
IT IS A BUS OF PEACE
Tim Blair
Peacebus.

About Peacebus.

Peacebus in action.
===
HELPING THE CHASERS
Tim Blair
“Since the Chaser boys are in a bit of a rough patch, I was hoping you’d publish these ideas for future sketches they can present,” emails Alan F. “I think these would fit in with their style quite well.” Indeed they do:
• Dress in full Nazi regalia and lay a swastika-shaped wreath at D-Day events. Watch as old veterans who don’t understand moral equivalency get flustered.

• Paint a fake pedestrian crossing across a freeway. Have a stuntman wheel a pram with a plastic baby inside into the path of oncoming cars and trucks.

• Dress in doctors’ gowns and set up a free swine flu testing booth in a mall. Tell people that they are infected and only have days to live.

• Set up a Santa Clause photo stall. When children sit on Santa’s lap, have Santa tell them that their parents hate them and are planning to sell them into slavery.

• Dress as a priest and set up a table outside the entry of a church on Sunday. Try to sell pornographic drawings of biblical figures and saints.

• Go into a hospital ICU. Explain to dying patients’ families that respirators and monitors are generating too many greenhouse gas emissions and they need to be turned off otherwise the hospital will be swamped by the rising ocean.

• Poison the water supply.
===
TO KNOW O IS TO LOVE O
Tim Blair
Associated Press headline:
Few Iranians see US favorably, despite Obama
These people must be idiots. It’s Obama we’re talking about here! The first God-American to be elected President! From the AP copy:
Few Iranians have favorable opinions of the United States, a view that has changed little since the election of an American president who has expressed a willingness to talk to Tehran, a rare poll of Iranian citizens showed Monday.
In fact, that view has changed by quite a margin:
Just 29 percent of Iranians said they have favorable views of the United States in the latest poll, which was conducted last month. In a similar survey in February 2008 — nearly a year before Barack Obama became president — 34 percent had positive opinions about the U.S.
The only explanation for this lack of Obamalovin’ is that Iranians just don’t know enough about him:
Iran’s media is largely controlled by the government, though the Iranian people increasingly have access to the Internet. That makes it hard to gauge how much information Iranians have received about Obama and his repeated statements that he is open to talks in hopes of improving relations.
===
RESPECTFULLY RAPED
Tim Blair
Like her fellow journalists Yvonne Ridley and Beverly Giesbrecht, Dutch leftist Joanie de Rijke was kidnapped by Islamic extremists.

Ridley converted to Islam. Giesbrecht faces beheading. And as for de Rijke:
She was held captive, raped repeatedly, and released after six days for a ransom of 100,000 euros.
But, hey, no hard feelings:
After her ordeal, she acknowledged that her captors “did horrible things to me,” but added in several media interviews “They also respected me,” and emphasized “They are not monsters.”
Read on. As you do, imagine de Rijke’s comments – and global reaction – if the events she describes had happened inside, say, Abu Ghraib.
===
YOU WILL BUY THE SLOW, BORING CARS
Tim Blair
A beautiful, coercive Obamic dream:
Sales of the Prius and other hybrids are expected to grow not only in Japan but also in the key U.S. market because of President Barack Obama’s stringent mileage and emissions standards for 2016.

“Hybrids are going to be hot-sellers,” said Koji Endo, auto analyst with Credit Suisse in Tokyo. “At least for the next three or five years, Toyota will have a definite advantage over the rivals.”
The current reality, as yet unaltered by Barakian mileage and emissions laws:
Toyota reports U.S. sales of its Prius hybrid are down a whopping 45 percent so far in 2009. It’s a far cry from this time last year, when Toyota dealers were tacking on a premium to the sticker price and had waiting lists for the cars.
Via Saint, currently featuring this:
Video game giant Electronic Arts has admitted it funded a group of fake protesters who pretended to be Christians as a publicity stunt to spur interest in its upcoming action game very loosely based on Dante’s “Inferno.”
===
Warmists to get another clobbering
Andrew Bolt

Scepticism is on the rise, and coming to a book shop near you. First we had the huge success of Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven on Earth, and now comes Professor Garth Paltridge’s The Climate Caper:
So you think the theory of disastrous climate change has been proved! You believe that scientists are united in their efforts to force the nations of the world to reduce their carbon emissions! You imagine perhaps that scientists are far too professional to overstate their case!

Maybe we should all think again. In his book The Climate Caper, with a light touch and nicely readable manner, Professor Paltridge shows that the case for action against climate change is not nearly so certain as is presented to politicians and the public. He leads us through the massive uncertainties which are inherently part of the ‘climate modelling process’; he examines the even greater uncertainties associated with economic forecasts of climatic doom; and he discusses in detail the conscious and sub-conscious forces operating to ensure that scepticism within the scientific community is kept from the public eye.

It seems that governments are indeed becoming captive to a scientific and technological elite – an elite which is achieving its ends by manipulating fear of climate change into the world’s greatest example of a religion for the politically correct.

The book’s cover illustration is perfect, and the author is perfectly credentialled:

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in Tasmania as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He retired in 2002 and continues to live in Hobart. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

That makes Paltridge rather better qualified to opine than climate catastrophists such as Tim Flannery, Al Gore, David Suzuki and just about any other author of a global warming scare-book you could think of. The book is out in July, but you can order yours now at the second link above.
===
How low can they go?
Andrew Bolt

Willow Palin is just 14. But what makes her fair game for rape jokes on national television is that she has one great fault that Barack Obama’s girls do not - her mother is a Republican:

What is it with the Left and abuse?

UPDATE

What is it with the Left and violence - and free speech? To protest against the alleged violence of the BNP, Leftist protesters physically attack its democratically elected leader. To protest against the BNP’s threat to freedom, they demand he not be allowed to speak.

Don’t believe it? Hear a spokesbigot from Unite Against Fascism astonish even the BBC with the fascism of her protest against, er, fascism.

UPDATE 2

The New York Times liked Letterman’s mockery of Sarah Palin so much that it posted it on its website - but with one, teensy, don’t-explain excision. Guess which “joke’’ didn’t make it?

UPDATE 3

To explain it patiently to the cave-dwellers who seem to argue that Letterman’s brutal “joke’ would have been fine if made against one of Palin’s other daughters (The eight year old? The 18 year old?), here is the daughter who accompanied Palin on her New York trip:

Palin is being accompanied by her husband, Todd, and daughter Willow, 14.

Why are so many of the Left so keen to apologise for barbarity like this? They merely associate themselves with what they seek to explain away.
===
If they were white, this would be a Cronulla
Andrew Bolt
If these Indian students were Anglos, they’d be monstered for staging another Cronulla. As it is, they tend to be portrayed instead as yet more victims of Australian racism for protesting against what the Cronulla rioters were protesting against, too:

Tensions mounted between Lebanese and Indians in Harris Park as stories circulated that the man who had appeared had been taken by four men to Fairfield before he escaped.

The issue of race had been simmering all night but as police put the man - red-eyed and distraught - in a police car he said he could not determine the ethnicity of his alleged attackers.....

Late in the evening a group broke away and clashed with a group of Lebanese men who then fled in a white car that hit at least one of the protesters in its path....Plans were made among the mob to travel to Granville to confront Lebanese youths, but they could not rally enough support.

Incidentally, it’s interesting, important and moral for the Sydney Morning Herald to drop its usual reticence in describing the ethnicity of offenders - a reticence still felt by the ABC and The Age, which is one reason this issue has been so poorly understood and so recklessly and falsely presented as yet more proof of Australian racism.

UPDATE

Paul Sheehan:

But the distorted story of white racism has been helped along by the prevailing sensibilities of reporting of crime in Australia, with skittishness about detailing the gritty reality that most violent street crime in Sydney and Melbourne is not committed by whites. The prison populations confirm this.

The attacks on Indians have followed this pattern, with the crimes committed by a polyglot mix reflecting the streets - white, Asian, Middle Eastern, Aboriginal, Pacific Islander.

The latest attack on an Indian, in Harris Park on Monday night, allegedly involved assailants of the proverbial “Middle Eastern appearance"… In Melbourne, an assault on an Indian student on a train was recorded on video and footage depicting the attack was posted on YouTube… Most of (the attackers) do not appear to be white.

A recent assault on an Indian student in Glebe was committed by a young offender described as Aboriginal. Another recent assault on an Indian student, by a knife-wielding assailant in Port Melbourne, involved three attackers identified as Caucasian.

UPDATE 2

Only when some of the victims scream “racism” do commuters get the protection they all deserve - white, black or brown:

Mounted police, dog squads and helicopter patrols will be used to crack down on crime at trouble-spot train stations after a spate of violent attacks against Indian students over the past month.

How bizarre. The is a policing decision driven by a fear of seeming racist, not by a fear of violence.

UPDATE 3

Apologies - the ABC this morning does name names in a news report. But certainly not on AM, where thought crimes are more rigorously policed.

UPDATE 4

Another analogy with Cronulla - this time the lack of police action for so long to deal with alleged Middle Eastern offenders. And once again we see it’s only the cry of “racism” that brings action:
Gordon Moyes, a member of the NSW upper house, said he understood Indian students’ rage at being “picked on”, but believed the problem of street crime in Harris Park had gone unaddressed for years…

Mr Moyes, a Christian Democrats MP, said he first became aware of violent street crime in Harris Park a number of years ago when, as head of Wesley Mission, he found his workers were repeatedly robbed while helping people in the area.

“I found that over a period of time many elderly Anglo-Saxon women were attacked and robbed and had their purses snatched and phones stolen,” he said.

He said the attacks were mainly carried out by young Middle-Eastern men.
===
Taliban respected me as they raped me
Andrew Bolt
The Brussels Journal:

In November 2008 a Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, was abducted by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. She was held captive, raped repeatedly, and released after six days for a ransom of 100,000 euros ($137,000). After her ordeal, she acknowledged that her captors “did horrible things to me,” but added in several media interviews ”They also respected me,” and emphasized “They are not monsters.”

Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders in Parliament:
This is a perfect illustration of the moral decline of our elites. They are so blinded by their own ideology that they turn a blind eye to the truth. Rape? Well, I would put this into perspective, says the leftist journalist: the Taliban are not monsters. Our elites prefer to deny reality rather than face it. One would expect: a woman is being raped and finds this unbearable. But this journalist is not angry because the Muslim involved also showed respect. Our elites, whether they are politicians, journalists, judges, subsidy gobblers or civil servants, are totally clueless. Plain common sense has been dumped in order to deny reality. It is not just this raped journalist who is suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but the entire Dutch elite. The only moral reference they have is: do not irritate the Muslims – that is the one thing they will condemn.

De Rijke - along with most of the Dutch political elite - is furious with Wilders, but not terribly convincing in denying his accusations of Stockholm syndrome:

De Rijcke (sic), 43, was kidnapped in November in the town of Sarubi, some 50 kilometres from Kabul. She was kept prisoner for six days and raped repeatedly by a Taliban leader, Ghazi Gul. But she wrote in a book; “I do not want to portray the Taliban as monsters, nor am I angry with Ghazi Gul. After all, he allowed me to live.”

De Rijcke now sounds a different note. ”I am indeed very angry with the perpetrators. I am furious with my abductors and rapists. All the things Wilders is saying are completely wrong,” said De Rijcke in Algemeen Dagblad Friday. “It is very, very painful. I am trying to recover from my trauma.”

Hmm. Her book cover picture alone does not seem to reflect a woman traumatised by an ordeal she’d rather forget:

Her interviews to promote it seemed remarkably relaxed, too, and utterly devoid of any anger or obvious sign of mental trauma. She instead talked freely of how “very religious” her captors were, how much “easier” the atmosphere in the camp was when she agreed to pray to Allah, how her captors had “told jokes” to relax her, how they’d done “nothing” physical to her, how they were engaged in a “religious” struggle (interview in Dutch, helaas):

I think Wilders actually has a point, except for this: Is it possible to suffer fom Stockholm Syndrome when you already admire your captors before they even catch you?

Or maybe that’s what he’s really trying to say.
===
If you believe, everything confirms your faith
Andrew Bolt
ABC presenter and global warming zealot Jon Faine this morning on Victoria’s winter weather:

I wonder if this snow is the result of global warming?

UPDATE

If you’re in the area:

ONE of Australia’s most contentious climate change academics will visit Bendigo this month. Professor Bob Carter is science adviser to the Australian Climate Science Coalition and a marine geologist from James Cook University..., will make his presentation from 7.30pm (Tuesday, June 23) in The Platinum Room at The Foundry Hotel. Bookings are not required and entry is $5. For further information, phone 0428 621 320.

And in Sydney, catch Professor Ian Plimer, author of the bestseller Heaven and Earth:

Date: Tuesday 23 June 2009
Speaker: Ian Plimer
Topic: The Theology of Climate Change
Time: 6:00pm (arrive at 5:30pm)
Venue: State Parliament House Theatrette, Macquarie Street, Sydney

UPDATE 2

A new political party - the Climate Sceptics - is enrolling members.
===
Swine flew the coop
Andrew Bolt
The great global warming pig flu scare slides deeper into farce:

SOME Victorians may have been falsely diagnosed with swine flu while others with the disease may have been sent home with a negative result because laboratory testing used to identify it is only about 90 per cent accurate....

Doubts about the accuracy of the tests came to light as the number of Australians identified with the virus increased from 1207 to 1224. Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the virus remained mild in Australians infected. About 10 people had been hospitalised, and no deaths had been attributed to it.

Not one death so far from swine flu, when some 2000 Australians each year die from the normal kind. Our hysteria is what we really need to treat.

UPDATE

Latest WHO count of deaths world-wide from swine flu:
139

WHO count of deaths world-wide from “normal” flu:
The three main seasonal flu strains (H3N2, H1N1 and type B) cause 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally (equivalent to 685 to 1,370 deaths per day)...

So swine flu has over the past few months killed as little as a tenth of the number of people that the three “normal” flu strains kill on an average day. Do you get the feeling that some politicians, journalists and UN officials are manipulating a scare to their advantage?

UPDATE 2

Reader Michael M. says the claim that 1224 Australians have swine flu may be a great exaggeration:

How many people have since recovered since the hysteria began and are no longer infectious or have symptoms (have basically recovered)?? Can they tell us how many people actually have it RIGHT NOW??
===
Israel: White House admits Obama went “too far”
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama’s cack-handed diplomacy hasn’t impressed France, Germany, Britain or, now, Israel, following the President’s pandering speech to the Arab world:

THE US President, Barack Obama, has assured Israel of America’s commitment to Israel’s security in a phone call to its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

There has been widespread public concern in Israel about the country’s relationship with Washington since Mr Obama demanded that Mr Netanyahu publicly endorse the creation of a Palestinian state and freeze all construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Mr Netanyahu has refused to accept either demand ..

Israeli media reported that Monday’s phone conversation between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu was conciliatory.

Israel’s biggest selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, quoted an unnamed aide to Mr Netanyahu who said the “conciliatory tone stemmed from the fact that the Americans realise they went too far and that, ultimately, Netanyahu is the partner that they have, and they must embrace him, not topple him”.
===
No one told Ramsay we’d changed
Andrew Bolt
UPDATE: Talk about a beat-up of the we’re-shocked-we-love-it kind:

GORDON Ramsay didn’t realise Australians had suddenly developed a few manners. Well, some of us.

Not that I blame him. It’s taken even The Chaser by surprise, which is why the boys found themselves yanked off air by the ABC last week for mocking dying children.

Nor did Channel 9’s Sydney version of The Footy Show twig, thinking a mere apology from host Matthew Johns for having group sex with a now devastated teenage fan was all that was required to keep him on air.

Sam Newman didn’t get it, either, and was startled to find himself sin-binned by Channel 9 for fondling a cut-out likeness of a female sports writer.

Even our artists - or should I say especially our artists - have been caught short, defending with their baas photographer Bill Henson for stripping and snapping a 13-year-old model for a perv’s-delight portrait, only to find the police busting in, the Prime Minister roaring of his disgust, and the Australia Council waving a censor’s scissor.

So if locals didn’t see our new prudery coming, who can blame a mere British blow-in like Ramsay for giving his audience at the Melbourne Good Food and Wine Show more of the gobful he assumed they’d seen before and had paid good money to see again?
===
Fielding’s must-answer question
Andrew Bolt
STEVE Fielding has had a conversion that could blow apart the great global warming scare.

No wonder the Rudd Government is scrambling and the ABC is already sliming the Family First senator. You see, Fielding has suddenly realised that global warming may not be caused by humans after all.

What has startled him out of merely accepting we’re heating the world to hell with our carbon dioxide emissions is one fact in particular.

While our emissions are increasing fast each year, satellite measurements show the world’s temperatures have still not risen above the 1998 record, and have actually fallen since 2002.

Of course, all this has been pointed out before. I’ve asked both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong - to their faces - to explain why the world isn’t still warming as it should if their global warming theories are right.

Neither has given me an answer. Nor have they answered similar challenges from the few sceptics in Parliament who have dared to reveal themselves - notably the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce and the Liberals’ Dennis Jensen.

But here’s why Fielding’s conversion is potentially so much more dangerous to the Government than sniping from mere columnists or Coalition MPs. Fielding is not just in a position to ask the Government the same question. He can also demand a straight answer.
===
As with the US, so with us
Andrew Bolt
Caroline Baum in the Business Mirror says fiscal stimulus does little but leave us with debt:

The (US) economy appears to be recovering without fiscal stimulus. The rate of decline in real gross domestic product has slowed. Less negative is the first step toward positive. And that’s before any real money gets spent. So far, $US36.7 billion has been distributed via various government agencies, according to Recovery.gov, the website that tracks where your tax dollars are going. That’s 7.4 per cent of the $US499bn of outlays and 29 per cent of the funds that have been committed to a purpose or a project.

So if fiscal stimulus can’t take credit for the improvement in the economy, what can? The answer is a combination of monetary policy and self-healing (an economy’s natural tendency is to grow)… The problem with fiscal stimulus, aside from the fact that it’s a misnomer, is that it arrives too late. If you believe, as I do, that monetary policy is the more potent of the stimuli, that fiscal stimulus just transfers spending from tomorrow to today and from the private sector to the government, with no net long-term gain, then maybe it’s time to stand up for the next generation.
===
Rudd crows the stones
Andrew Bolt
It’s when Kevin Rudd tries to do that matey, colloquial thing that you realise how painfully he’s had to study how to be human, and how old his books are:

Rudd: Well, fair shake of a sauce bottle, mate. If you were to compare what this government has done in terms of the promotion of women of talent and ability compared with our predecessors, it is chalk and cheese. We have Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. We have appointed the first woman as Governor-General. Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate.

Speers: Couple of surveys out today, some confusing news, though: business confidence is up but the job ads are again down.

What’s your take on where things are currently headed?

PM: Well, again fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate. What we’ve had with this data is for, the first time, stabilisation at around about zero, minus0.2.

Speers: Are you encouraged by that?

PM: Well, one swallow doth not a summer make, or whatever the Bard said, and we’re not out of the woods yet.
===
Better poster needed
Andrew Bolt
Poor casting:

Mr Tribe, who faces a possible six-month jail sentence, has become the human face of the union movement’s fight to have the Rudd government scrap the ABCC’s controversial coercive powers.

Just the kind of the show of force, too, that might line up more people behind Joe:

INFLUENTIAL union leader Joe de Bruyn has declared Labor does not have a “mandate” to scrap the coercive powers of John Howard’s building industry watchdog in its first term, contradicting construction unions, which are leading a national campaign to have the powers abolished.
===
They actually believe this?
Andrew Bolt
The Times of London is supposed to be a pillar of the Establishment. So if the paper now chooses an academic such as Ziauddin Sardar to write book reviews as crazed and venemously anti-American as this, is shouldn’t be long before the roof falls in:

American citizenship is not citizenship but conversion: it involves brainwashing and imposition of a single, fixed nationalistic identity that turns the citizens into patriotic zombies. Uttering a single word against the State is out of the question.

Could someone tell Michael Moore that he’s out of the question? Or is Sardar simply out of his mind?
===
Bolt asks
By the way:

Would a generation raised on physics taught as clearly yet rigorously as it was by Julius Sumner Miller demand better proof of global warming before checking in their bulltish meters?
===
Liberalism and Human Rights
By Bill O'Reilly
As you may know, we are independent thinkers here. Looking out for you requires that discipline.

That being said, the state of liberalism in America is confusing to say the least, especially in the human rights arena. For example, the record shows that after the 9/11 attack, the USA waterboarded three — three — high-ranking Al Qaeda bigshots, getting lifesaving information from them.

Yet some liberals still insist that America is a torture nation. The New York Times and others continue to paint the USA as a consistent human rights violator under the Bush administration. No matter how much evidence is presented to prove that is a gross overstatement, the myth is still being perpetuated, even by President Obama.

But when a liberal cause is shown to be brutal, left-wing reaction is quite something else. Investigators in Kansas have presented strong evidence that late-term abortion doctor, George Tiller, who was murdered by a domestic terrorist, destroyed viable fetuses for trivial reasons. The former head of the psychiatric school at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Paul McHugh, says flat out that Tiller used a so-called mental health provision to brutally terminate fetuses for just about any reason.

But The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and other liberal newspapers have no problem with that. In fact, The Times actually called Tiller a hero.

Now think about this. The waterboarding of heinous terrorists who participated in mass murder is called barbaric. But the destruction of thousands of late-term fetuses for casual reasons is called heroic. Now if that's liberalism, I will never be a part of it.

There is no question that what Tiller did was brutal and had nothing to do with Roe v. Wade, as the liberal media would have you believe. Thirty-six states outlaw or severely restrict late-term abortion. Four others have fought the courts that long because it is rarely necessary and always lethal.

And then there's Jessica's Law. Again, very few liberal media outlets support mandatory minimum sentences for convicted child rapists, even though more than 40 states now have it. But the liberal media doesn't want it, although they're inflamed over Guantanamo Bay.

Finally, let's go back to Private William Long, assassinated last week in Arkansas by an American Muslim terrorist. Now I criticized the network news and CNN for basically ignoring the story while ginning up the Tiller murder. As I reported last Friday, I didn't misspeak about CNN. They did cover the story dayside, but their prime-time coverage was scant. In fact, up to the point where I mentioned the Long-Tiller comparison, CNN had devoted approximately 190 minutes, more than three hours to Tiller while giving about 36 minutes to Private Long. That's about a six to one margin. So there you go.

There's no question the liberal media doesn't much like reporting on deadly Muslim terrorism or gruesome late-term abortions where babies are extracted from the womb and a medical instrument driven into their skulls. No, those realities are ignored by many liberals. So who is really looking out for human rights here: The New York Times and their acolytes, or those of us who want to save as many lives as we can, both inside and outside the womb?

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