===
Kyle, Jackie O stunt 'child abuse'
RADIO rape stunt on teen girl should be treated as child abuse, say prominent Australians.
Australian tourism 'on life support'
TOURISM'S worst year in decades won't go away with the crisis expected to hit new lows. - Thank you Rudd. -ed.
Terrified family flees pervert grandad
A GRANDFATHER who repeatedly raped his 8-year-old granddaughter remains free, leaving his victim sick with fear.
'Dying patient' admits cancer con
A WOMAN has admitted that she faked having terminal cancer to con money from members of her sympathetic community.
Mum of 13 vows to keep number 14
A MUM banned from raising her kids says she'll keep having them until authorities let her keep one.
79-year-old hoon to get car impounded
MAN caught doing 160km/h told cops "it was lucky you didn't get me before, I was going faster".
Good Samaritans sacked over sandwich
TWO council workers were sacked after they received free food for helping the elderly.
Miss Universe Australia Rachael Finch flees monster croc
MISS Universe Australia Rachael Finch met some crocodiles during her Northern Territory visit yesterday and had to run for her life when a 5m croc named Eric lunged at her.
Men, women see differently - study
MEN are better at seeing things in the distance due to their hunter-gatherer past chasing animals, while women are better focusing on things at close range, a British study said.
=== Comments ===
Aussie left to rot away in a foreign hell hole
Piers Akerman
EVER since Australia elected its first diplomat prime minister, the nation’s foreign relations have been in a downward spiral.
Those trapped between Kevin Rudd’s UN ambitions and his attempts to curry favour with tin-pot Third World dictatorships are paying a cruel penalty.
One such is Perth’s Peter Gray, held in Mauritius for four years without charge on trumped-up heroin accusations.
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith has made it clear that Gray is on his own. So much so, that Smith’s department cancelled Gray’s passport - on information provided by Mauritius police
In correspondence between Smith and Gray’s relatives, Smith flatly noted: “There is no requirement under section 13 of the Passport Act for a person to be actually charged prior to the cancellation of a passport.” - That sound you hear from the busy offices of Australian Government under the ALP is Smith washing his hands of Australia's obligations. At least Gray hails from WA, and they have a Liberal government. Maybe he can get some support from them. I'm reminded of how Bob Carr in NSW promised in 2004 that NSW would not go to war in Iraq .. and they didn't. Until then, I hadn't been aware that states could cover for the inability of the ALP to be sensible in any form of government. So powerful are these lesser Government bodies under the ALP I half expect the Fairfield Mayor knock back a sister city arrangement with the Great Consumer Al Gore. - ed.
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SAD TRAD
Tim Blair
An interesting result:
Islamic identity Keysar Trad’s defamation case against a Sydney radio station has collapsed, with a Supreme Court justice saying Trad did in fact make remarks that were “offensive’’, “racist’’ and “condone violence’’.
Friday’s judgment comes in opposition to a jury’s decision in 2007 which found Mr Trad was defamed by broadcaster Jason Morrison, who implied that he was a disgraceful, dangerous individual who incited people to commit violent acts.
Trad’s lawyers have indicated he will appeal the decision.
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FREE MONEY STOPPED
Tim Blair
It was fun for the six days it lasted:
Congressional officials say the government plans to suspend the popular “cash for clunkers” program amid concerns it could quickly use up the $1 billion in rebates for new car purchases.
The Transportation Department called congressional offices late Thursday to alert them to the decision to halt the program, which offered owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.
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STANCE TAKEN
Tim Blair
Yes, I am opposed to gay divorce.
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Labor’s pay to play
Andrew Bolt
What else will Labor sell them?
AT 8am today, the Labor Party will sweep aside a velvet rope at the Sydney Convention Centre and beckon in an exclusive coterie of ticket holders.
Together, these 100 business leaders paying $7500 each will pour almost $1 million into ALP coffers in exchange for some face time with government ministers on the sidelines of the party’s national conference.
The ALP’s cash-for-access program could provide a real-time case study for the Crime and Misconduct Commission as it looks into this pay-per-view style of political fundraising.
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Just blame warming instead
Andrew Bolt
Yet another blame-global-warming stunt by people with their hands out:
THREE of Australia’s biggest non-government organisations are hosting competing visits by Pacific Islanders to urge Kevin Rudd to do more to combat climate change - and especially rising sea levels… Oxfam and Greenpeace are hosting a visit about the impact of climate change from Pelenise Alofa Pilitati, managing director of a Kiribati NGO; Reverend Tafue Lusama, chairman of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network; and Marstella Jack, former attorney-general of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Sadly for them, reporter Rowan Callick wasn’t born yesterday:
Bill Mitchell, who manages the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that provides the only observed data for the region, said its records only extended to almost 20 years.
“It is not clear yet what contribution long-term climate change is making to sea levels, but we are getting there,” he said....
The Oxfam report does not, however, cite the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is run by Australia’s National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, which operates the only Pacific-wide equipment to measure sea level rises… These have revealed that the Pacific countries - especially those in the west and nearer the equator, mostly Melanesian and Micronesian islands - are seeing sea level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.
These figures are further complicated by satellite altimeter measurements, which, the National Tidal Centre says, “show evidence of a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992”. ...
Sydney University geography professor John Connell has explained, though, that other factors besides global warming that have probably affected Tuvalu’s vulnerability include the construction of new roads between islands, the sealing of an airport runway, removing vegetation, land reclamation, sea wall construction and mining for sand used in construction. ..
Ursula Rakova, 43, who grew up on the Carterets - six tiny atolls around a lagoon 25km across-- is visiting Australia with the Australian Conservation Foundation… She acknowledges that a contributory factor is that the islands are located on top of an underwater volcano, which is steadily subsiding, but says she believes climate change is another factor.
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For your BA in Howard Hating, learn this…
Andrew Bolt
How the University of New England teaches modern Australian history. From the disgraceful course notes prepared by one or more of the above staff:
Topic Nine: The Howard Years, 1996-2007
In the mid-1990s, many families, who traditionally would have been categorised as working class, were facing high rates of unemployment and high interest rates… Given that migrants, ethnic minorities and Indigenous people make up a very visible component of the community receiving welfare it is not by chance that the Coalition appealed to traditional Labor working class voters by driving a political wedge between the conjured “deserving” and “undeserving” groups in society, thus indirectly tapping into racial prejudices and antipathy towards welfare recipients.
What ought to have been perceived as a straightforward economic issue became twisted, and in some minds interpreted in a xenophobic context… What Howard did was exploit, and bring into the open (he would likely argue that he removed the pall of political correctness), a mind-set which viewed welfare dependency, unionism, migrants, Indigenous rights and asylum seekers as factors contributing to Australia‘s economic decline. For Howard battlers these factors were perceived as undermining their economic and social security, and were seen as a threat to their future.
The Howard years offended the sensibilities of many while giving expression to the sentiments of others. Arguably the political and ideological chasms between differing divisions in society were exposed and amplified, resulting in confrontation and in some instances, such as the Cronulla Riots, actual physical violence…
Even before the 1996 general election John Howard had been accused of being backward looking, as someone seeking to return Australia to a simpler, less complicated time when entrenched conservative values held sway. This yesterday‘s man portrayal of Howard, and his supposed backward looking desire to return Australia to the 1950s era of ?Menzian‘ and monarchist values, is but one of many interpretations of his character. But it is the one that struck an accord with many people. The reality was that although he presided over a period of Australian history where there was a retreat to a conservative ethos and an apparent narrowing of society‘s vision, seen by some as a loss of tolerance, that this actually masked considerable change in outlook as well as forcing a confrontation with some deeper and darker aspects of the Australian psyche and its past such as reconciliation, mandatory detention of asylum seekers and racism. These are issues that this topic will explore, along with other aspects of the treatment of asylum seekers, Indigenous relations, ethnicity and multiculturalism, One Nation, industrial relations and the “war on terror‘. These subjects were all seen as important realms of debates that highlight internal social divisiveness that many commentators have seen as characterising the Howard years...
===
Trad trodden
Andrew Bolt
Keysar Trad, the long-time spokesman and apologist for the then Mufti of Australia, is indeed a racist and a bigot:
KEYSAR Trad, the longtime spokesman for Muslim cleric Sheik Taj bin al-Hilaly, has been described as “racist” and “offensive” by a judge who today rejected his defamation claim against radio station 2GB…
“There is little doubt that many of the plaintiff’s remarks are offensive to Jewish persons and homosexuals,” Justice McClellan said in his judgment.
“Many of his remarks are distasteful and appear to condone violence. I’m satisfied that the plaintiff does hold views which can properly be described as racist. I’m also satisfied that he encourages others to hold those views. In particular he holds views derogatory of Jewish people. The views which he holds would not be acceptable to most right-thinking Australians.”
Mr Trad, who founded the Islamic Friendship Association, faces up to $400,000 in court costs and there are question marks over his credibility after Justice McClellan’s scathing judgment.
During the trial he was subjected to close scrutiny about his public profile as Sheik Hilaly’s right-hand man and he frequent statements he made to ”clarify” the controversial views of the cleric.
Our Muslim community has been betrayed by its choice of spokesmen. A small blessing is that Hilaly has since been dumped as Mufti, and Trad gets a much smaller run from the media than he was once so irresponsibly and undeservedly granted.
BTW, how dare Trad try to use the courts to shut up criticism of his outrageous views and activities, which included translating for the pro-bin Laden Islamic Youth Movement. Lovely that it’s backfired on him.
===
Why are warming alarmists so rude so often?
Andrew Bolt
When you’ve got no facts, this is all you’re left with when you disrupt a public presentation to challenge a warming sceptic like Professor Ian Plimer:
Tensions reached boiling when a guest jumped out of his chair to accuse Prof Plimer of hypocrisy and even said: ”Are you going to come and punch me in the face.” The man eventually took his seat after Prof Plimer said “he was displaying the height of bad manners which indicates ill-breeding”.
===
Enough with this carp
Andrew Bolt
A lot of scientists have finally had it up to here with their cause-pushing colleagues:
An outpouring of skeptical scientists who are members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) are revolting against the group’s editor-in-chief — with some demanding he be removed — after an editorial appeared claiming “the science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established.”
The editorial claimed the “consensus” view was growing “increasingly difficult to challenge, despite the efforts of diehard climate-change deniers.” The editor now admits he is “startled” by the negative reaction from the group’s scientific members. The American Chemical Society bills itself as the “world’s largest scientific society.”
The June 22, 2009 editorial in Chemical and Engineering News by editor in chief Rudy Baum, is facing widespread blowback and condemnation from American Chemical Society member scientists. Baum concluded his editorial by stating that “deniers” are attempting to “derail meaningful efforts to respond to global climate change.”
Dozens of letters from ACS members were published on July 27, 2009 castigating Baum, with some scientists calling for his replacement as editor-in-chief.
When this hysteria has finally passed there will be an accounting. Those who sold out science for fame, fortune and flim-flam will be made to pay.
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Rudd’s tick-tick-tick deceit
Andrew Bolt
Check out the ludicrous countdown clock on Labor’s website, as it tries to build up an air of tick-tick-tick urgency to a vote in just 13 days on its disastrous emissions trading scheme:
Countdown for Climate Change Vote
The truth is not only that the scheme will kill jobs, will fail to halt our growth in emissions and won’t make a blind bit of difference to world temperatures anyway. Fact is, even some of the world’s leading warming hysterics admit there’s no urgency at all to the vote, whatever Kevin Rudd so dishonestly claims:
IT won’t matter if Australia doesn’t have its emissions trading scheme finalised by December’s Copenhagen climate change talks, the head of the UN’s climate change agency says.
Other nations will only care that the Federal Government has made a commitment to reduce emissions targets ahead of the summit, Yvo de Boer says....
But when asked whether it mattered if Australia arrived at Copenhagen in December with a scheme in place, he replied: “Quite honestly no.”
There are, in fact, just three reasons why Rudd wants the vote held so fast, before the rest of the world makes even the slightest move to follow our useless lead:
1. Pure politics - Rudd wants the Liberals to reject his bill (as they will) to give him an excuse for an early election.
2. Pure vanity - Rudd wants a fluff his feathers at Copenhagen as a world leader on a UN crusade like climate change, to push his claim to be the next UN secretary general.
3. Pure fear - Rudd knows that the Copenhagen summit in December will produce no binding plans from the rest of the world to cut their gases, too, which will makes Rudd’s own emissions trading scheme much harder to sell after the summit than it is now.
===
Crisis meeting
Andrew Bolt
Isn’t this humiliating? Here’s a president of the world’s greatest super-power having to pour drinks for a police officer and an over-excited professor after he foolishly got involved in a trumped-up claim of racism.
You’d hesitate to send in even a negotiator from the local council for something so trivial, yet Barack brought even his vice president for support:
President Barack Obama is hailing his meeting with professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and policeman James Crowley as a “friendly, thoughtful conversation.”
In a statement after the three men and Vice President Joe Biden chatted over beers, Obama said he learned that Gates and Crowley had already spent some time talking with each other. He called that “a testament to them
When Obama must get involved so intensely in a stupid argument like this, how on earth will he go in a war?
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Arbib chokes on Rudd’s deceit
Andrew Bolt
Employment Participation Minister Mark Arbib gets in a terrible tangle on Sky News trying to justify Kevin Rudd’s false claim (see column below) that he’s creating 50,000 green positions.
David Speers: Does that mean that you are calling this a job or does that mean they’ll be remaining on the unemployment benefit?
Arbib: No, well, this is ... yeah this is a work experience program.
Speers: Is it a job or is it a work experience program?
Arbib: A work experience program is a job. They’ll be actually working during this time.
Speers: When you say it’s a job, do they get sick leave? Do they get superannuation? How is it just not the same as the work for the dole scheme?
Arbib: Well, I don’t have all the details.
Speers: But you’re the minister.
Arbib: Well, I am, but I don’t have all the details today for you mate. But what I can tell you ...
Speers: But it’s just been announced by the Prime Minister.
Arbib: 10,000 young people, 26 weeks’ training, plus work, day after day, it’s a great, great result.
Speers: But it is still being worked out.
Arbib: No, no, this scheme will be under way in January 2010, and obviously some of the detail will still have to be finalised, but ...
Speers: Is one of those details whether it will be a job or work experience?
Arbib: Well, well ... it’s a fine line but can I tell you it is work experience. Work experience is a job.
The excruciating video is here.
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Of Sandilands and dirty paws
Andrew Bolt
In the toilet at my work hangs a new sign, of the kind no one thought necessary in the days before the rise of Kyle Sandilands.
It’s from the Commonwealth of Australia, which realises it’s now the last authority left to teach us the most basic of manners.
Stamped with the Commonwealth seal, it begins: “How to wash and dry hands.”
What follows are detailed instructions, with drawings of hands in helpful poses for those who’ve failed to learn not only the art of keeping their paws clean, but even the skill of reading words such as “Wet hands with warm water” without pictorial assistance.
The Commonwealth has since supplied a follow-up lesson for the cleverer of the simians it’s trying so urgently to civilise.
So in our toilet hangs a second sign for those who graduated from its course on how to scrape the dung from their palms. This one is on how to cough in public, again with useful pictures for apes whose low brows furrow at words as hard as: “When coughing or sneezing use a tissue to cover your nose and mouth.”
No doubt it won’t be long before the Commonwealth rushes out chapter three of its Manners for the Modern Moron, “How to wipe your backside.” But the question is when it will get far enough down its how-to list to finally reach the chapter that Sandilands, the top-rating FM radio star, so badly needs to have stapled to his hide.
I’m talking about the one headed: “How to not publicly humiliate a 14-year-old girl who’s been raped.”
Again, before Sandilands hosted Sydney’s most popular FM breakfast show and became a star on Melbourne’s Fox FM, as well, I’d bet none of you would have dreamed that a sane adult needed to be taught any such thing.
But just as we’ve forgotten even how to wash our hands or avoid hacking phlegm into people’s faces, we’ve forgotten, too, why it’s barbaric to make sport of girls just 14 having sex.
Two days ago, Sandilands and his sidekick, Jackie O, brought into their studio a woman so keen for a couple of free concert tickets that she’d prostitute her daughter - in the figurative sense, I mean. So she’d dragged in her 14-year-old for a segment in which contestants are strapped to Sandilands’ lie detector for the hur-hur-hur of apes everywhere.
So what did she want to ask her daughter, she was asked as drooling listeners lifted their hairy ears.
===
From real jobs to green ones
Andrew Bolt
FIRST Kevin Rudd tells you we’re heating to hell when the planet has actually cooled for eight years.
Now he’s claiming that the colossal tax on emissions he’s imposing to “stop” this (non) warming will create more jobs than it will kill.
And if you believe that, you deserve precisely what you’re going to get.
Yesterday the Prime Minister gave a speech to the national Labor conference that showed he’s feeling more heat than he’s let on from the sceptics he’s claimed barely exist.
“The climate change sceptics constantly scaremonger about the possible loss of jobs through the transition to a lower carbon economy,” he complained.
“But they constantly fail to talk about the new clean energy jobs of the future which will arise from the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the renewable energy target and energy efficiency measures in the future.”
In fact, Rudd announced, he’d now spend yet another $94 million (of money he no longer has) to “create 50,000 new green jobs, traineeships and apprenticeships”. Sound good?
===
The price of green stupidity just went up
Andrew Bolt
The promise in 2007:
THE controversial $3.1 billion Wonthaggi desalination plant will be built as one of Victoria’s biggest public-private partnerships.
The promise in 2009:
The Victorian Government announced today that AquaSure will build the $3.5 billion plant at Wonthaggi .
That’s already a $400 million blowout, even before a brick is laid. And as the costs mount, the jobs shrink.
The 2007 promise:
The economic impact study, by Monash University, found the plant would create 3180 direct and indirect jobs, with 150 full-time jobs in operating the plant.
The 2009 promise:
...in a project expected to generate 1700 new jobs...
I’m not sure at all these people know what they are doing. Especially when the alternative was this:
Yet Melbourne Water ... admits (a Mitchell River) dam would cost just $1.35 billion—less than half the price of the desalination plant, but producing three times the water.
Of course, with this price blowout, a dam would now be around a third of the price for three times the water. And that’s even without adding the cost of the power a desal plant would suck up.
This green faith - and the ban it’s imposed on new dams - is costing us billions.
UPDATE
Uh oh:
Crucial financial details — including how much taxpayers will pay at times when the plant is not producing water — will remain secret until the deal is finalised in September…
The chairman of the winning consortium, Tony Shepherd, said AquaSure had secured $800 million in equity and $4 billion in debt, and would now seek to sell down its debt to superannuation funds. Premier John Brumby said the Government would take the debt off the consortium’s hands at commercial rates if buyers for the debt could not be found. But Mr Brumby stressed he did not expect this to occur.
Of course, the minute a government takes on a debt that no one else wants, the rate is no longer commercial.
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Stupidity taxed
Andrew Bolt
Paying more for nothing? Why does every green fad seem the same?
Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
In reporting this news, The Age, otherwise known as The Daily Lentil, interviews three locals - two organic food extremists who dismiss the science, and one consumer advocate who wishes butchers would advertise organic meat more conscientiously. A bit like their global warming, coverage, actually.
===
Farrelly gases on
Andrew Bolt
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly in a pulpit:
The climate-change crisis begins, similarly, with the fond belief that we can all live four times plumper than most historical royalty, and builds to the point where only the tyranny we will never accept can save us… But Australia charges blindly off in another direction, happily expelling more and more carbon dioxide, like Wall-E’s screen-bound space-floating fatties. Still, they learned to walk again, on their own pudgy feet. Perhaps we, on a new low-carbon diet, can do the same?
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly in a four-wheel drive:
It’s a point that remakes itself at every step of our 8000-kilometre swag through the Big Empty, from Sydney to the Alice and back.
Hmm, remind me again what Farrelly once wrote about such fossil-fueled excesses?
Even without climate change, there’s still the filth, waste and breathtaking short-termism of a fossil fuel economy.
That’s the one.
===
Caldicott beached
Andrew Bolt
From the Sydney Morning Herald’s profile of anti-nuclear hysteric Helen Caldicott:
“I haven’t retired, I think I never will,” says Caldicott, who has been passionate about anti-nuclear issues since reading Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach as a 15-year-old.
This puzzles JF Beck:
On the Beach was published in 1957; Caldicott was born in 1938. Believe this woman at your peril.
===
Is America an Unfair Country?
By Bill O'Reilly
Behind all the bloviating on government-run health care lies a simple question: Are we a fair country? Is the USA a rigged game, or does everyone have a chance at a good life and good health?
Government-mandated health care would be the most expensive entitlement in history, and passions are running high on both sides. To make your decision, it is important to understand the truth behind the debate and the vision that President Obama holds.
Liberal Americans generally believe that the country has been unfair to the poor, that folks with little money should receive a major helping hand from folks who have money. Conservatives tend to believe that the government should stay out of economic pursuits and allow folks to compete. Whether they win or lose is not the government's business.
President Obama is a classic liberal, a man who wants the federal government to provide as much as possible to the poor. Mr. Obama believes in economic and social justice being imposed from Washington. But the vast majority of the folks are against him on that.
A new Rasmussen Poll says 65 percent of Americans want fewer services and lower taxes from the federal government. And 69 percent of us believe the USA is a fair and decent country just the way it is.
"Talking Points" believes Americans were ready to listen to President Obama's health care vision because medical care is much too expensive in this country. But Mr. Obama has not been able to articulate specifics, instead falling back on confusing scenarios and ideology.
On Wednesday in a North Carolina town hall meeting, the president once again spoke long and said little. Many folks looked like they were transported back to a high school physics class. In fact, we could not pull one interesting sound-bite from this exposition. Not one.
The truth is that the economic and social justice theory is not taking root in America, and President Obama is being stymied by that. We are a hardworking country that gives more to charity than any other people on Earth. But we do not respect handouts, especially when they might bankrupt the nation.
That is Obama's dilemma. The folks are not with him philosophically, and I don't believe they ever will be.
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