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PM to travel to Europe, meet with Pope
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will have an audience with the Pope next week when he travels to Europe...... - the pope will not endorse Rudd for being faithless, or funding family planning, but the Pope will respect the Australian PM. - ed.
Gillard defends Rudd's soft interviews
PM accused of favouring frivolous media engagements over serious current affairs programs. - many senior journalists do the same, excusing Rudd for incompetence -ed.
IVF blunders destroy baby dreams
EMBRYOS lost, destroyed in a blackout and dropped on a floor are just some of the costly errors.
North Korea test-fires two missiles
North Korea has test-fired two more missiles, South Korea's defence ministry says, further stoking......
Africa refuses to act on Sudan war crimes warrant
The African Union has refused to act on an international war crimes warrant for Sudan's president, at a summit that also forged a deal on a new regional authority for the region - although one that could be toothless.
NRL to investigate Eels' secret deals
The Parramatta Eels have been accused of rorting the NRL's salary cap with undisclosed payments of up to $100,000 to players through secret property deals.
ACT funeral held for 'Bob the truckie'
Canberra grandfather Bob Knight, the innocent victim of a recent shoot-out in Sydney, has been remembered as "Bob the truckie", a regular on talkback radio.
Madonna plans Jackson tribute at UK show
Madonna will perform a special tribute to Michael Jackson during her London show at the venue where he was due to stage his farewell shows, she says.
Sarah Palin resigns as Alaska governor
In a surprise move, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin says she is stepping down and will not seek re-election, fuelling swift speculation of a possible 2012 White House bid.
Protests mark start of Biden's Iraq trip
A FIERY protest marked the start of US Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Iraq, three days after a major US troop pullback. - it is only fair that they protest. Many Iraqi's will die for the Democratic party's policy. - ed.
=== Comments ===
DRAIN EXPLAINED
Tim Blair
“You know the real reason why Time mag is going down the drain?” asks Nick Gillespie. “The content!” Can’t argue with that:
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DUNK A MODO
Tim Blair
Due to shame, the Washington Post has cancelled an event at which the paper planned to sell access to its reporters and editors (plus key Obama administration and Congressional leaders). But other struggling media enterprises should take up a modified version of the WaPo‘s idea, writes Cliff Thier – starting with the New York Times:
I’d pay to throw baseballs at a target to dunk Maureen Dowd in a tank of water.
Or, to guess Paul Krugman’s weight.
Or, watch Bob Herbert trying to ignore the laws of gravity on a high wire.
Or, Frank Rich in a cage reasoning with lions.
Or, Thomas Friedman putting a sword down this throat while writing about a Bangladeshi doctor he met while waiting for a plane.
Or, to see how many David Brooks can fit in a Volkswagen.
There’s a fortune to be made at Australian newspapers if this new business model catches on.
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PALIN QUITS
Tim Blair
Breaking news:
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will resign this month and will not run for re-election as governor, CNN reported on Friday.
UPDATE. Last day in office will be July 26:
Her spokesman wouldn’t say why Palin decided to step down, but the announcement stirred speculation that she would focus on a bid for the 2012 Republican nomination for president.
UPDATE II. Via Michelle Malkin, Fox’s Chris Wallace believes the announcement is a sign Palin won’t run in 2012.
UPDATE III. Instapundit: “I don’t know if it has anything to do with her decision, but she’s been subjected — along with her family — to more abuse than any other non-national-officeholder I can think of.”
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LUCKY DINERS NOW X-RAY RESISTANT
Tim Blair
Weren’t Republicans meant to be the ones poisoning America? At least they never fed toxic lettuce to the homeless:
It was meant to be a show case for healthy living, with the first lady, Michelle Obama, personally putting hand to pitch fork in a crowd of school children to dig up the first White House vegetable garden in more than 50 years.
Instead, an embarrassed White House admitted today that the plot – whose lettuce, herbs and other produce have been consumed by the first family, visiting dignitaries, local school children and a women’s homeless shelter – had tested positive for elevated levels of lead.
It’s back to safe Whole Foods arugula for the Prez. Reuters insists that lead levels in Obama’s garden of doom aren’t dangerous; then again, they also think that “gardener” is spelled without the first “e”. Possibly due to lead poisoning.
OBAMA UPDATE. “Once an American president had promised we would bear any burden,” writes Bill Kristol. “Our current president promises ‘we will continue to bear witness.’ It’s quite an evolution.”
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RULE DEFIED II
Tim Blair
Peter Roebuck, March 17:
Brett Lee will be hard pressed to regain his place in the Australian Test team … It’s hard to see him playing any part in the 2009 Ashes and he’ll be 33 in November, a combination that does not bode well for a wholehearted cricketer deserving of a better fate.
Lee has crossed a fine, unseen line and, as a rule, there is no going back.
The SMH, today:
Brett Lee surged into Australia’s Ashes attack with a devastating spell of reverse swing bowling …
The veteran paceman resurrected his Test career with a burst of 5-21 in 40 balls against the England Lions in the tour game at Worcester, rediscovering his extreme speed …
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How many dead per second?
Andrew Bolt
Mesmerising, and even frightening. Watch the world’s numbers spin, as we die, breed, kill and spend by the second. Discount for some of the tendentious preaching, however.
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Temperature back to normal
Andrew Bolt
New figures in from NASA’s Aqua satellite - and they show that the global temperature in June dropped back to just about the average for the past 30 years. Which mean we’re back to “normal”.
The average temperate rise per decade over those 30 years was 0.13 degrees. And, of course, we’ve had a cooling trend over the past eight years:
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Green scrooges wanted
Andrew Bolt
Green believer Adele Horin:
Given climate change, and the social and environmental costs of Western-style consumption, surely the world needs more cheapskates.
Flying spendthrfit Adele Horin:
(P)utting the passport in the bottom drawer would really hurt the people who probably care most about global warming. Those who have seen the world are likely to have not only a pile of frequent-flyer points but an affinity with the inhabitants of countries most imperilled by global warming.
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Sorry was a distraction, not a platform
Andrew Bolt
Paul Kelly seems faintly surprised that Kevin Rudd’s “sorry” to a non-existent ”stolen generations” and talk of “targets” has left Aborigines as poor, jobless and sick as ever. I’m surprised that anyone ever thought Rudd’s stunts were anything but.
What ails Aboriginal townships is not a lack of compassion in white hearts, but a lack of personal responsibility and drive in black culture. Crudely, it’s not about us, but them. Feeding the guilt industry and talking loudly of how much more compassionate you are is a sign that a politician does not understand the true changes that need to be made - huge changes that will take generations to bear fruit, and which must largely come from within the communities themselves.
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Palin quits
Andrew Bolt
Sarah Palin quits as Governor of Alaska. Her party waits to hear if she’s preparing a bid for the presidency:
The Alaska Republican Party has not been informed whether Gov. Palin plans another run for national office and as such cannot comment on that possibility.
But this doesn’t sound like the first shot in a campaign to be president:
Sarah Palin abruptly resigned on Friday as governor of Alaska, saying she did not want to waste her time on ”political blood sport”...
Brad Norrington speculates on other options:
The glamorous 45-year-old Governor, meanwhile, appears to be enjoying the celebrity amid rumours she might run for the US Senate next year to boost her national profile or, failing that, do a reality TV show. Asked if she could beat Mr Obama, Ms Palin said that determination and endurance made up for what she lacked in comparable physical strength. “So if it were a long race that required a lot of endurance, I’d win,” she said.
Of course, it may be that Palin wants to spare her family more of the astonishing slimes, inventions and fantasies that the Left has heaped on her in the most unprincipled and barbaric pile-on I’ve ever seen in politics.
Indeed, the Huffington Post, which called Palin’s Down Syndrome son a ”runt” at a time when Michael Moore and other Leftists were claiming he was actually the son of Palin’s eldest daughter, now bids a typically vicious farewell, of the kind that makes me wonder how the Left can possibly claim these days to represent a more humane politics:
In Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement she complained about the treatment of her son Trig who always teaches her life lessons. She said that the “world needs more Trigs, not fewer.” That’s a presidential campaign promise we can all get behind. She will be the first politician to actually try to increase the population of retarded people.
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Rudd’s revenge
Andrew Bolt
Hugh Borrowman once advised Kevin Rudd on foreign affairs, but without crawling. Rudd now has his revenge, not only blocking Borrowman’s appointment to Berlin, but giving him a second prize he can’t accept:
HUGH Borrowman — the senior diplomat Prime Minister Kevin Rudd barred from a top posting to Germany — has now been forced to drop his concession prize of the ambassador’s role in Sweden. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith last night said Mr Borrowman had pulled out of the job because his disabled adult son could not have maintained his status as a disability support pensioner had he taken up the Sweden post.
Investigations by The Age reveal that had Mr Borrowman’s appointment to Germany gone ahead as Mr Smith had recommended, a treaty between the countries would have ensured his son kept his entitlements. Australia has no equivalent social security arrangements with Sweden.
Remember the excuse Rudd gave for overturning a promotion recommended by his own Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith:
The Prime Minister said Mr Borrowman was rejected for the Berlin post because his German skills were sub-standard.
And remember Smith’s glowing praise of Borrowman?
He has qualifications in German, Mandarin, French and Swedish languages.
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Wong as wrong on sea as on air
Andrew Bolt
Senator Steve Fielding asked the Rudd Government a simple question to prove to him that man’s gases really were causing the world to heat to hell:
Is it the case that CO2 increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period (see below)? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?
When I’ve mentioned, too, that the warming has paused since at least 2001, global warming believers have often preferred not to believe it, or even to see it. But Fielding, with a power to block the Government’s emission’s trading scheme in the Senate, could not be fobbed off. So Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and her advisors had to give him a formal answer.
They still say there’s been an overall warming trend since 1998 (technically true, I believe, but certainly not true of the years since 2001) but imply that any more recent cooling doesn’t count:
(A)t time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend caused by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases.
But, more importantly:
When climate change scientists talk about global warming they mean warming of the climate system as a whole, which includes the atmosphere, the oceans, and the cryosphere… (I)n terms of a single indicator of global warming, change in ocean heat content is most appropriate.
So all that talk about hotter temperatures at this city or that town? Just kidding. The goalposts are now switched. The real measure is in fact the rise in temperature in the oceans. Which, you’d assume from Wong’s response, is real and alarming.
Small problem. The best measure of ocean temperatures, the Argo buoys, actually record a fall in temperature since 2004:
Dr David Evans has more.
Indeed, Evans and three other scientists and weather experts assisting Fielding - Professor Bob Carter, former National Climate Centre head Bob Kininmonth and Associate Professor Stewart Franks - have now complied a more formal response to Wong’s answers, which they find unconvincing. Their report below (and apologies for the formatting errors and the failure here to reproduce graphs). You’ll see it tears to shreds Wong’s case for believing in apocalyptic man-made warming, and concludes that Fielding’s questions “remain unanswered by the government”:
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Warming millions good, sceptics’ thousands bad
Andrew Bolt
The ABC’s Emma Alberici yesterday tried to smear Senator Steve Fielding as the dupe of corrupt scientists, paid by Big Oil to deny global warming.
ALBERICI: Bob Ward (above) - a policy director at the London School of Economics - first wrote to ExxonMobil in 2006. He was concerned about the financial support the company provided to climate change deniers…
WARD: They have stopped funding for a number of the groups that have been denying climate change but they haven’t stopped funding them all. Yet they have been telling people that they have stopped all that funding. So I think they should either own up that they are continuing funding for some of these groups or they should keep their promise.
ALBERICI: How many groups and what are the kinds of figures we are talking about as far as sums of money?
WARD: Several hundred thousand dollars a year… These organisations are not informing public debate on climate change, they are trying to mislead people...
Already a couple of things scream out from this report. First, if Fielding’s facts are wrong, then why not simply show why, rather than smear? But if they are right, then what does it matter if Big Oil helped to fund some of the groups publicising the science? All I see here are red herrings.
Second, why does Alberici - who is better than this - stoop to use the term “denier”, which is not only false but a deliberate and disgraceful attempt to align sceptical scientists and politicians with Holocaust deniers?
But here is the most astonishing thing about Alberici’s report. Not only is the money ExxonMobil gives an insigificant fraction of the billions handed out to global warming scientists and spruikers, but it’s also a fraction of the money that Ward’s own Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the LSE got from a global warming evangelist to preach the doomsday gospel:
Jeremy Grantham has given British universities £24m in a bid to save the planet… The British financier, who founded the Boston-based investment fund GMO, which has £55 billion under its management, gave the money to the London School of Economics (LSE) to fund an institute for researching the economics of climate change. A similar amount went to Imperial College London to study climate science.
Altogether, the £24m is one of the largest donations ever made to climate research… So why did Yorkshire-born Grantham do it?
“Because climate change is turning into the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. I wanted to invest my money in places where it might actually help tackle that problem,” said the financier last week…
Which makes Ward a monumental hypocrite.He complains that a few hundred thousand dollars from Big Oil corrupts debate, but says nothing about the more than $20 million his own university gets from Big Warming.
Why did Alberici not mention this?
So here’s the deal for the ABC. Debate the science, but if you must claim that the funding corrupts, at least admit which side gets the most of it.
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Gassing on about a deal
Andrew Bolt
Tom Switzer is right to doubt there will be much a deal at the Copenhagen summit on global warming at the end of the year:
In exchange for its own carbon cuts, the Chinese government expects the US and other developed nations to cut their emissions by at least 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. Yet the US legislation that only marginally passed the House of Representatives to cap greenhouse gases (with loads of compensation and loopholes for big polluters) translates to about a 4 per cent reduction from 1990 levels — that is, one tenth of what Beijing demands.
China’s leaders also call on the US and other advanced nations to cough up between 0.5 and 1 per cent of their annual GNP to help poorer nations cope with climate change. Yet the entire US foreign aid budget currently amounts to about only 0.17 per cent of GNP.
No wonder the left-liberal, pro-green Los Angeles Times editorialises: ‘Poor countries are placing such extravagant demands on wealthy ones that no American president, even a strong environmentalist like Barack Obama, could possibly accede.’
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Better than a short mountain
Andrew Bolt
Better remembered in Australia for the name he gave to our highest mountain than he is in America for the service he gave for its freedoms. But now at least given a biography in English.
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