Headlines Monday 20th July 2009

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Betty's Birthday
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Digger 'forever in my heart'
THE heartbroken girlfriend of fallen Digger Benjamin Ranaudo says a part of her soul was stolen when he was tragically killed.

Grotesque bomb victim photos circulated
IMAGES of the body parts of Australian bombing victim Nathan Verity are being circulated.

Family of five bludgeoned in bed
THERE is no obvious motive in what police describe as the worst crime they've seen in years.

Deteriorating country roads blamed for road toll spike
DETERIORATING country roads are to blame for a spike in Victoria's road toll, the state opposition says.

Policeman drunk behind wheel
A DRUNK policeman has been stung by his work collegaues for driving while nearly five times over the legal limit.

Austalian Tax Office takes no prisoners
THE tax office is said to be ruining thousands of self-employed workers and small businesses.

Why single women prefer dogs to men
AUSTRALIA'S single women are turning their backs on men and opting for a much more loyal and reliable companion - a dog.

Patients to see medical records online
EVERY Australian would be able to see their medical records online and keep a personalised "health diary" under massive reforms promising better care and big taxpayer savings. - now Rudd is in government he no longer needs to oppose legislation he would have opposed in opposition. - ed
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LOCAL BOOKS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE
Tim Blair
Bob Carr, then the state opposition leader, was flicking through a magazine in the early 1990s when he happened upon a book review.

The book in question was about former American first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a person of interest to the Premier-to-be, and the review made clear that it was a very fine biography indeed. So Bob made his way to a bookstore and asked if the title was in stock.

No, came the reply. Nor would it be for some time. Perhaps it might never be.
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TERRORISTS OF NO RELIGION
Tim Blair
The Age reports:
A guidebook for politicians, police and public servants on how to talk about Muslims and terrorism without implicating the religion of Islam should be released by the end of the year.
That’s nice, but is anyone working on a language guidebook for terrorists? They implicate the religion of Islam far more often than do any Australian public servants. Osama bin Laden is a constant offender, for example, yet his fans don’t seem to mind. A helpful guidebook could fix this. More from Andrew Bolt.
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WEATHER LOTTO
Tim Blair
A cash challenge for warmenist sceptics:
1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.

2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the first month being August. At the end of each month, we’ll tally up the winning and losing days and the loser writes the winner a check for the balance.

3. The challenge automatically rolls over to the next month until/unless: (i) one party informs the other by the 20th of the previous month that he would like to discontinue the challenge (that is, if you want to discontinue the challenge for September, you’d have to tell me this by August 20th), or (ii) the losing party has failed to pay the winning party in a timely fashion, in which case the challenge may be canceled at the sole discretion of the winning party.
Sadly, the challenge is only open to US residents. If we’d been betting on this month’s Sydney temperatures, I’d currently be up by $50. Of course, one of those below-average days came when Al Gore was in town …
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THIS ONE TIME AT CAMP …
Tim Blair
Anticipation builds ahead of October’s Camp for Climate Action ("three inspiring days of workshops, sustainable living and grassroots direct action"). Here’s the latest – and thus far only – comment at the official Camp site’s most recent post. A previous post drew this solitary response, which suggests an unusual range of campside activities planned by our climate activist friends. Not safe for work, by the way.
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KEEP ON TRUCKIN’
Tim Blair
When in charge of markets, governments tend to deliver what they think the public should buy rather than what the public wants to buy. Which is how things are shaping up for GM, now under majority government ownership. Last month the carmaker planned to shut its Orion plant:
But a few weeks later, the company reversed course. GM now says it will retool Orion to make compact, gas-sipping cars. The change of heart says a lot about how GM’s new owners – the federal government owns 60% of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) owns 17% – are making considerations other than profitability a top priority for the auto maker.
Because if profitability were a priority, the Orion plant might be re-tooled to build something even larger than the mid-size sedans it’s currently producing:
As Ford looks to reinvent itself with smaller, energy efficient vehicles they are faced with the stark reality that as of late May their Ford F-150 series continues to outsell the Toyota Camry.

Let that sink in for a moment. The best-selling truck in the U.S. still outsells the best-selling car …
There is a widely-held view outside the US (and within it) that the US auto industry is in crisis due to producing the wrong vehicles – behemoths, when everyone wants capsules. This isn’t so, as even Barack Obama knows. The main problem lies elsewhere, as Mark Steyn has pointed out:
GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.?

?How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around 1600 bucks; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell.
Solution: keep making the popular trucks, but cut the gigantic corporate socialism. Oh, and appoint Iowahawk as US car czar:

Obama – a Hemi man himself, when allowed his choice – is headed in the opposite direction: too small to fail.
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DRIVER SOCKED
Tim Blair
They do love their laws in Queensland, as I discovered last week when I was stopped from carrying a drink upstairs at a Townsville nightclub ("against the rules, sir” – apparently it’s a health and safety issue). And now:
Police fine taxi driver $100 over short running socks
Maybe he was planning some illegal upstairs drink-carrying after his shift. You can’t be too careful. Canada is much the same.
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DO UNTO OTHERS
Tim Blair
Ted Kennedy remembers that time in the 1960s when he risked his life to rescue someone from a crashed vehicle. No, wait – it was someone else rescuing Ted. My mistake.

UPDATE. The 40th anniversary Google logo you’ll never see.
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POLITICAL DIVIDE HEALED
Tim Blair
Europe’s far right is anything but, writes Mark Steyn:
On closer inspection, Europe’s “far right” doesn’t seem to go very far at all. The British National Party’s parliamentary victories are a very belated breakthrough for Fascism, for which in Britain there were few takers back in the Thirties. So what do they stand for? Well, they won’t accept blacks or Asians as members. Typical right-wing racists, eh? Also, they want protectionist laws limiting the import of foreign goods. And they favor giving workers shares in their bosses’ companies. And they want to nationalize the public utilities, railroad companies and so forth. Economic protectionism. Worker cooperatives. State ownership. Boy, these right-wing nuts with their crazy ideas on free market capitalism.
One Nation was also described as “far right”, despite its economic notions (protectionism, etc) being closer to those of the Australian Democrats and the Greens. On major issues, these assumed opponents are friendly.
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UNCOVERED CATMEAT
Tim Blair
We have problems in Australia with domestic felines chomping on native animals. But in the US, the situation is reversed:
A new study has found that a large portion of coyotes’ diet in Arizona consists of house cats.
They’re tastier and easier to catch than roadrunners. Coyotes are learning.
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TRUSTED SOURCE
Tim Blair
Tim Lindell notes a piece from the Associated Press on the latest nuisance lawsuit filed against Sarah Palin, by one Gregory Charles Royal:
The Anchorage Daily News liked the story so much they posted it not once, not twice, but three times - including an entry on the Alaska Politics Blog by Bill White.

In all of those stories, the version of events offered by the plaintiff in the suit, Gregory Charles Royal, was offered uncritically and without any background on Royal. He’s only identified as “a Washington, D.C., musician”. Nowhere do [Associated Press reporter] Rachel D’Oro or Bill White answer some rather critical questions that their readers might have, such as “Who is this Royal guy?” and “What are his motivations?”
So Lindell does the legwork himself, turning up a number of interesting points, including this:
Royal first appeared in the public eye in relation to Palin through the graces of Toronto-based blogger Charley James.
Charley James! The fake-named bogus blogger whose Palin-hating fantasies ended up on front pages in Australia! Nice to see that his mainstream influence hasn’t diminished.

UPDATE. This is hilarious. The New York Times quotes Sarah Palin’s hairdresser on Palin’s allegedly thinning hair ("she needed emergency help”) only for the hairdresser to come forward and slam the NYT as liars.
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ABBREVIATED JANEANE
Tim Blair
Comedienne and limbic brain expert Janeane Garofalo bombs in Britain:
Janeane Garofalo cut short her Saturday afternoon set in Latitude’s comedy tent because of the poor reception she was given by the audience. The American comedienne’s rare UK live appearance was expected to be one of the highlights in a strong comic line-up, but she failed to win over the festival crowd …

Garofalo was due perform for half an hour, but left the stage after less than ten minutes when her routine about post-9/11 security checks at airports met with stony silence.
Next on stage was Ed Byrne, who asked: “Now that I’m doing a longer set, can I have some of Janeane’s money?” Twitter reviews of Garofalo’s performance are brief, but almost as long as her routine.
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But now her gases smell sweeter
Andrew Bolt
Now Greenpeace extremist Emily Hall wants to save the world from all the gases she jetted out over it:

She spent several years leading a “hedonistic carefree lifestyle” and travelling the world before deciding that what she really wanted to do was save it.

“Before” doesn’’t quite seem the right word, actually. Even now, Hall can’t quit her nasty habit of hedonistically gassing on at high altitude:

She came home (to New Zealand) for a year to study environmental science in Nelson and got stuck into the environmental movement volunteering for the Green Party… Hall then returned to London, and starting as a volunteer, worked her way into a job with Greenpeace UK two years ago....Last week she was arrested in Italy during a Greenpeace operation targeting the G8 Summit....

If she protested less, she’d cut greenhouse gases more.
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Too many tribes
Andrew Bolt
It’s a decade or two too late, but finally even The Age is now hosting a debate on multiculturalism in which for once the “racism” word is used correctly - against not mulitculturalism’s critics, but its proponents.

Here’s the ANU’s Dr Lindy Edwards making acceptable a critique that was beyond the pale when made by conservatives before most of the damage was done:

However, two serious problems have emerged. The first has been the effect of governments trying to define a culture. Policies that fund communities have worked to treat cultures as homogenous groups and have tended to let leaders, often older religious men, define the culture. In the process they have failed to recognise that cultures are made up of thousands of often competing and conflicting threads, and are in a constant state of change.

If a stagnant and conservative version of a culture is institutionalised, it becomes oppressive; the debate and diversity within a community are silenced…

The second problem is the impact on broader societal tensions. The term “multiculturalism” has always carried a number of different meanings. For many people it is just a catch-phrase for embracing diversity. But for others it conjures an image of separate communities living in parallel.

The danger lies with this latter image. Political racism works when leaders divide people into separate groups, and then focus on the conflict between them. The rhetoric creates an illusion of homogeneity within both groups and sets the scene for differences to seem irreconcilable.

This echoes my own critique - that multiculturalism stereotypes migrants and presupposes greater ethnic differences than there often are, rewarding most those who integrate least. Communities therefore tend to be represented by the leaders who are most hostile to integration, which actually threatens their power, and who are most eager to take offence over their new country’s failings, which improves their bargaining position. This encourages not just the appearance but at times the reality of social division, with every action of rejection inviting a reaction by the offended “other”, now encouraged to see themselves as defined by their ethnic group, too.

If you wanted to foster division with the best of intentions, multiculturalism is precisely the policy you would adopt.
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Secret unveiled
Andrew Bolt
Ocean, Sky and Khaki says the army’s best-kept secret is probably how to send a parcel of goodies to our soldiers in Afghanistan.
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Modern families
Andrew Bolt
The Family Court compounds a misjudgment:

A 62-YEAR-OLD lesbian has been awarded access by the Family Court to the three-year-old child of her former partner, despite the couple splitting after living together for less than a year and a judge ruling the woman was not legally the child’s parent.

The child’s 44-year-old mother has been ordered to allow her 62-year-old former partner, who has suffered from psychiatric conditions and has a history of self-harm, to have access to the child.

The Family Court has ruled that, although the 62-year-old did not live in a de facto relationship with the woman and was not legally a parent of the girl, she could have court-ordered access because she was a significant person in the child’s life.

We have punitive tests of the suitability of couples wanting to adopt - tests which screen out many. Why was there no similar test made of the 62-year-old? Or, indeed, of her partner?
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Nor was it racist to say Hitler was a danger
Andrew Bolt
David Burchell on China’s useful Australian idiots, screaming “racist” at those warning against a totalitarian regime:

Since in our era there is nothing so virtuous or high-minded as exhibiting a higher degree of cultural “sensitivity” towards other peoples and cultures than your rivals, the self-styled China expert can have it both ways. You can advocate a political course of the simplest, most brutal expediency, and exhibit a demeanour of lofty and serene moral grandeur, at one and the same time.
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Combing through the lies
Andrew Bolt
Who would you trust most - the New York Times or Sarah Palin’s hairdresser?

UPDATE

Why is it that when Keith Olbermann backs your account, your credibility actually falls?

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Lunar theory
Andrew Bolt

On the 40th anniversary of man first walking the moon, it’s time to note how reason, not romance, is our best hope of peace - as well as of technological advance.

Since those days, you see, the conspiracy industry has risen with our irrationality. In fact, some people are so beyond reason that other forms of persuasion must necessarily be found:

Consistent poll numbers suggest six per cent of Americans believe the first moon landing was an elaborate hoax aimed at instilling national pride. Not surprisingly, a Russian poll conducted in 2000 found that 28 per cent of Russia’s citizens believe the moon walk was fake. And a poll conducted in the U.K. less than two weeks ago suggests 25 per cent of Britons don’t believe it really happened…

By way of proving the hoax, the conspiracy theorists point to photos from the Apollo 11 mission, claiming the American flag is rippling in an apparent breeze in what is supposedly the vacuum of space…

The notion is so galling to the astronauts that Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, punched one of the leading conspiracy theorists in the face

UPDATE

Top 10 moon myths debunked.

Why this effort is even needed is the most telling. It’s disturbing to think how many people there are who think several hundred scientists, astronauts, technicians, politicians and relatives kept secret for 40 years the “myth” of the moon landing - and presumably did it all over again for the next five landings.
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Wrong people told
Andrew Bolt
Hey, don’t tell us, tell them:

A GUIDEBOOK for politicians, police and public servants on how to talk about Muslims and terrorism without implicating the religion of Islam should be released by the end of the year. The book, A Lexicon on Terror, was conceived by Victoria Police and the Australian Multicultural Foundation, but was so popular it became a national project, an international conference on Islamophobia at Monash University heard yesterday.

Tell, for instance, the people who have generated these reports over just the past day:

Radical Islamist group takes over French hostages

Jakarta bombings: Why Indonesia’s Islamist radicals attack

Muslim extremists seeking to overthrow Indonesia’s democracy

Suspected Islamist duo killed American in Mauritania: state security

German Islamists heading to Pakistan training camps

44 top Islamist militants held in Bangladesh

Taliban Threatens to Kill US Soldier Unless West Stops Bombing ...

Join jehad or invite wrath, Zawahiri tells Pak
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The prize is to be handcuffed
Andrew Bolt
Foreign policy analyst Hugh White on Kevin Rudd’s bizarre quest for the dubious prize of a temporary seat on the United Nation’s Security Council:
Rudd’s ‘creative middle-power diplomacy’ will in the end only get as far as China is willing to let it… One thing this shows is how silly the UNSC candidacy is. It is supposed to increase our influence in the world. In fact, it does the opposite: you become vulnerable to pressure from everyone who has a vote, so you find yourself bending over backwards to please (or avoiding displeasing) everyone at once. That makes it harder to take strong stands on contentious issues, and more susceptible to pressure. And for what? Once you are on the council no one cares how you vote, because the work is all done by the P5 (permanent five members) anyway.

Glenn Milne:
That, of course, hasn’t stopped Rudd outlaying more than $1.5 billion on his Quixotic UN tilt.
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A year left to win in Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
This may be right, but by saying it publically it’s also setting a deadline for defeat:

AFTER eight years, US-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next year to avoid perceptions that the conflict has become unwinnable, the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

That doesn’t sound like anything George Bush would have said. Which is precisely its weakness, of course.
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Paying students to dumb down
Andrew Bolt
More evidence that Kevin Rudd as wasted billions on improving nothing in education that truly counts:

Before the 2007 election Kevin Rudd vowed to spend $2.3 billion rewarding parents who installed or bought home computers…

Jacob Vigdor, of Duke University, North Carolina, has conducted what is probably the world’s biggest study on the effect on maths and reading scores of gaining a home computer. He finds “statistically significant” evidence that it sends them backwards.
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Eleventh Digger killed in Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
We have lost our eleventh soldier in Afghanistan. The announcement was made by the Australian Defence Force this morning.

The soldier was just 22, and was killed by an IED. Another Australian soldier was injured in the explosion.

This brings to 51 the number Coalition troops killed in Afghanistan this month - making it already the deadliest month of fighting there.

Britain has now lost more soldiers in Afghanistan than it has in Iraq. Canada alone has suffered an astonishing 125 fatalities. That said, the Coalition deaths in Afghanistan are still a quarter of those suffered in Iraq. It’s just that Iraq is essentially won, but Afghanistan has little end in sight. It’s also that Americans were left to do almost all the real fighting in Iraq, while now its partners are asked to do their share in Afghanistan.

Typically, it’s largely the English-speaking countries that have responded.

UPDATE

In response to objections below to my last sentence: Sorry, I should have been clearer. As I’ve written before, a major point of contention within NATO is that it’s largely the English-speaking nations (and the Netherlands) which have sent their troops into the most dangerous provinces, with aggressive rules of action. Yes, other nations have sent soldiers, too, but it’s where they are and what they are allowed to do that counts most. Hence my comment.

UPDATE 2

Confirming the point, JF Beck notes that four in five Coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan are from Anglophone countries:

Wikipedia’s Coalition casualties in Afghanistan page shows 1,182 coalition deaths connected with Afghanistan operations of which 985 (83.3%) were sustained by the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.