===
A symbol of hope.
===
Minimum wagers receive double blow
Low paid workers with a mortgage have received a double whammy of nothing. - Thank you Rudd and Gillard .. for nothing. - ed.
'He sexually assaulted 23 drunk men'
A Perth man posed as a taxi driver, lured drunk young men into his car and sexually assaulted them, prosecutors say.
Stomach bug 'made Nate defecate in hall'
NRL star Nate Myles says he didn't mean to defecate in the corridor of a hotel, blaming the incident on a stomach bug and being locked out of his room.
Bird's accuser breaks down in court
The woman who accused Greg Bird of assaulting her at a night club has sobbed in a Sydney court after being told of discrepancies in her evidence. Gil Taylor was there.
Police seek owner of human skull
A human skull that washed up on a Sydney beach has police looking for its owner, who should be alive and kicking.
Malcolm Turnbull unveils 'debt truck'
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is relying on a ute to help turn around his political fortunes following the disaster of the Utegate affair.
Rudd hoses down climate expectations
Rudd and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have hosed down expectations of a major breakthrough on climate change when world leaders meet in Italy on Friday.
Dungeon dad made daughter a sex slave
AN 18-year-old German girl was held prisoner and repeatedly raped by her father after tracing him to South Africa.
=== Journalists Corner ===
A Memorial for Michael!
The preparations, thousands of fans and star-studded performances...
As the world gathers to honor the King of Pop, FOX is on the scene!
===
Putting Politics Before Product?
We reveal how the government is driving GM's business decisions!
===
Palin's Political Shocker
Will Sarah's body language reveal why she resigned? "The Factor" finds out!
===
Guest: Gov. Haley Barbour
Sanford's Scandal and Sarah's Surprise Split -- What does it all mean for the GOP? He reacts!
=== Comments ===
Will President Obama Become the New Arnold Schwarzenegger?
By Bill O'Reilly
The parallels are spooky. Both men are charismatic and used their personalities to get elected.
But for Governor Schwarzenegger in California, it has been a disaster. His approval rating now stands at 33 percent. The state is bankrupt. It cannot pay its bills, and it is issuing IOUs.
When Arnold took office in 2003, California was spending $71 billion. It is now spending $92 billion, while running a $26 billion deficit. That is hard to believe, and it happened on the governor's watch.
If President Obama does not learn from this, the USA could go bankrupt as well, no question. But the Obama administration does not seem to be learning. In fact, there is now talk of yet another massive federal stimulus package:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The truth is there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited. Now that — I'm not laying this on anybody. It's now our responsibility.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
But Mr. Biden and the president must know the stats are grim. Right now, the feds are spending almost $2 trillion more than the government is taking in. If that continues, the American dollar will collapse. The national debt is now almost $11.5 trillion, and if the feds get into managing health care, that number will explode.
Even Nancy Pelosi could figure this out. If President Obama continues the massive spending, every American will suffer — and soon.
But it looks to me like many Democrats in Congress don't care, just as the California legislature did not care. The liberal philosophy is one of big spending. They believe government should provide for everybody.
Nice thought, only it's impossible. And by trying to create a nanny state, the economic system in America could implode. It has happened in California under a Republican governor. Pray it doesn't happen to the entire country under President Obama.
===
BAD GUYS CUT
Tim Blair
The London Times, five hours ago:
Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.
And subsequently rewritten:
Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill today by encouraging political leaders to follow the example of Britain’s wartime leader and unite their nations to fight climate change.
As Simon Scowl notes: “The Times of London has now removed all mention of the Nazis from the story and changed the headline to ‘Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change.’ (So he must have meant some other enemy Churchill fought.)”
===
HISTORY FILED
Tim Blair
Veteran journalist David Jones joins his siblings in sorting through their late mother’s belongings – and discovers a newspaper goldmine.
===
CAR FOR COMMENT
Tim Blair
According to Green Left Weekly:
[Tim] Flannery’s injunction to “follow the money” turns up industry funding of many so-called “climate change sceptics”.
It also turns up $US50,000 speeches delivered by Tim Flannery. And now a new car:
Flannery bought a Toyota Prius three years ago but has since become an ambassador for the vehicle. He is due to take delivery of his third generation model in the coming weeks, in return for some public speaking engagements.
The latest Prius retails in Australia for up to $53,500. Tell your local Toyota dealership you’ll pay for one by speaking in public.
UPDATE. Further from Flannery:
A paleontologist by trade, he said the white ring-tailed possum has been around for at least five million years but exposure to temperatures above 34C for more than four hours results in its untimely death.
What happens if you put them under water for two minutes?
UPDATE II. Then there’s Al Gore, of course:
He’s getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
===
BRING ON THE BOOTLEGGERS
Tim Blair
H2Oibition in Australia:
The Southern Highlands village of Bundanoon is poised to become the first town in Australia, and quite possibly the world, to ban commercially bottled water …
All Bundy’s shops have supported a ban, agreeing to lose over-the-counter income in order to combat the hefty carbon footprint associated with bottling water and trucking it around the state.
Wait until they find out about all the other stuff that gets trucked around the state. Meanwhile, in England:
The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions …
Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses.
Sharia law is looking better by the day.
===
IT IS ALWAYS COOLER IN STRATHBOGIE THAN IN EUROA
Tim Blair
A climate mystery is finally solved.
===
TREATY DEFEATY
Tim Blair
“There will be no Copenhagen treaty,” promises Times world business editor Carl Mortished. “There will, no doubt, be an agreement, full of pomp and promising words, but no pact that would stem, let alone reverse, the continuing increase in carbon emissions. Nothing that will stop the relentless mining and burning of coal: the fuel that powers Asia, the fuel that made the clothes you wear and the screen you watch.”
Good.
===
The Sceptics Handbook
Andrew Bolt
Perth-based science communicator Joanne Nova has published a sensational Sceptics Handbook, already translated into German, French and Norwegian.
It crisply summarises the biggest weaknesses in the arguments that man is heating the world to hell, and suggests the best ways to argue against alarmists. Please circulate widely.
===
China bares its fangs
Andrew Bolt
In case you doubted the true nature of China, now the real industrial-military complex:
Australia pressed China on Wednesday to explain why four staff of Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto ... had been detained amid tense negotiations over iron ore exports to China.
This simply confirms how inapporpriate it would have been to approve this investment in Rio by the Chinese giant Chinalco:
Tensions had been simmering below the surface for months between Canberra and Beijing over the Chinalco deal, which would have given the state-owned company an 18% stake in Rio, the world’s third-largest miner, and two board seats… Australian government officials have made clear through the inquiry that they don’t favor Chinese state-owned enterprises making large-scale takeovers of Australian miners but market participants say that China won’t likely be deterred.
The collapse of that deal may help explain the tensions now:
THE biggest investment deal in both Australian and Chinese corporate histories has collapsed, with Rio Tinto expected overnight to withdraw its board support for a $US19.5 billion investment from Chinalco… But it will spark a major spat between the Anglo-Australian miner and the Chinese aluminium giant, with Chinalco demanding that Rio pay a $US195 million break fee.
Consider that spat unresolved. And note that China’s state-owned companies are never really at arms length from their undemocratic, nationalist government.
===
This reckless spending must stop - again
Andrew Bolt
Could Kevin Rudd please take his own advice?
WORLD leaders needed an exit strategy from the unprecedented spending and government intervention they resorted to during the global economic crisis and should use the G20 to co-ordinate it, Kevin Rudd said last night.
Is this another example of chameleon Rudd taking on the coloration of his surrounds? After all, he was speaking in Germany, whose Chancellor had just days earlier said this:
Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has flagged she will be pressing for nations to commit to lowering their deficits and reversing their stimulus measures...
Still, it’s good that Rudd no longer is the great “social democrat” who just months ago wrote:
...the role of the state has once more been recognised as fundamental
===
More sexless sailors wanted
Andrew Bolt
Time for another round of shocked - shocked! - stories about fit, young men being hungry for sex after being locked in a floating can for weeks:
PERTH brothels are increasing staff to contend with the arrival of two US warships carrying more than 5400 sailors.
===
Banning not burkas but little red dresses
Andrew Bolt
Rod Liddle on the madness of fairness tribunals:
A Bosnian Muslim woman, Fata Lemes, has just won £3,000 from an employment tribunal because the Mayfair cocktail bar in which she worked required her to wear a red dress (above) in the summer months. She said this was humiliating and made her feel ‘like a prostitute’ and ‘violated her dignity’ and therefore she refused to wear the dress. She complained and won her appeal. ..
The red dress Ms Lemes was required to wear was not in the least bit revealing, incidentally — less revealing than the slinky t-shirt worn by the woman (below) on her Facebook site, apparently. I assume Fata is now busy applying for jobs in a pork pie factory, or a dog pound, or a synagogue, and keeping in touch with her lawyers. There’s another thing about working in a cocktail bar which might make Mohammed, pbuh, a bit twitchy. Can you work out what that might be? Hmm, let me think....
The final irony of the Fata Lemes case is that the money was awarded to her not because her Muslim faith had been transgressed with that red dress, but because she had been transgressed as a woman. Those were not the grounds upon which she had based her appeal, but the tribunal seems to have decided unilaterally that those are the grounds upon which she should have based her appeal. Their point being that while waitresses were expected to wear nice red dresses in the summer months, no such demand was made of the waiters. Somehow this unsurprising fact grated with the panel, the notion that women had to wear dresses and men did not. The discrepancy seems to have grated with the panel rather more than it grated with Fata Lemes. That is because — I would contend, M’lud — that the panel was comprised of mad men and mad women, as these panels usually are.
===
Taking the heat off Gore
Andrew Bolt
The Times gets it right the first time, properly underlining the absurdity of Al Gore’s alarmism:
Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.
Alas, Tim Blair notes that the Times abruptly rewrote the hyperbole to make Gore seem saner.
Brendan O’Neill gives Gore the full bore:
He’s getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests…
Gore is also chairman of a greeninvestment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business.
As for Tim Flannery....
===
Doomsday not yet
Andrew Bolt
More doomsday merchants should be held to account - and not just the climate ones:
CONTROVERSIAL economist Steve Keen has refused to back down from his doomsday prediction that house prices in Australia will almost halve over a decade despite growing evidence to the contrary.
Nine months after his dire prediction that property prices will fall by 40per cent over 10 years, fellow economists have pronounced Professor Keen—who was held up as one of the few commentators to see the global economic downturn coming—“spectacularly wrong” on his outlook for the housing market....
According to property data agency Residex, the apartment market in Surry Hills experienced an average capital growth rate of 7.08 per cent in the year to May… Property data agency RP Data described Surry Hills as one of Sydney’s most resilient unit markets, with prices rising last year compared with a decrease in most other markets.
And, from last December:
The Australian dollar may fall below $0.50 in the first half of 2009 as falling commodity prices and a shortage of funds for private firms tip Australia into a recession, according to Morgan Stanley.
Swine flu, global warming, SARS…
===
Paying to play at saving the world
Andrew Bolt
How much of our money is Kevin Rudd splashing out to bribe foreigners into signing a useless deal to stop a warming that actually halted eight years ago?
BRITISH Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he has won Kevin Rudd’s backing for a bold proposal to create a $122 billion-a-year climate change fund for poorer countries, in the hope of breaking the deadlock threatening a new global agreement to fight climate change.
And that’s not including the billions he’ll waste on our own emissions trading scheme, or the billions we’ll then lose in productivity and sales.
===
Searching for some sexless sailors
Andrew Bolt
THE navy is shocked - shocked! - that healthy young men cooped up on its ships look at the healthy young women by their side and want to, er, rock their boats.
In fact, so shocked is the navy, apparently run by old and devoutly Christian aesthetes who still undress in the dark, that four sailors from HMAS Success have been removed from their ship at Singapore.
Their crime? To have run a contest to sleep with the most women on board.
Yes, stifle your gasps. You’ve never seen anything so horrific since the last time you went to a disco or office party. Or last watched Channel Nine’s sex-on-the-sea show, Sea Patrol.
Anyway, this contest had a few rules that’s been deliciously eye-popping for the kind of people who love to drool and damn at the same time.
Sleeping with an officer or a lesbian won extra points, and the sailors kept score in a book known as the ledger, with dollar amounts written next to the name of each woman.
Which is where I start wondering where the navy got so old-fashioned, albeit in an almost refreshing way.
How many of these women actually slept with the bounty hunters?
None, I’d bet. In which case, why all this fuss?
Or is the answer “plenty”? And then we must ask: why haven’t those women been sent home, too?
===
Cool to be a sceptic
Andrew Bolt
NOW that it’s so chilly, I can understand why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong wants us to stare at the sea, instead.
Better that than have us stare at the latest satellite data showing the world has now cooled down to the average temperature of the past 30 years.
Last month Family First senator Steve Fielding asked Wong a question she could no longer ignore: what proof did she really have that man’s gases were heating the world to hell?
And what got her attention was Fielding’s threat: if she didn’t give a good answer, the Rudd Government would not get his crucial vote in the Senate for its plan to slash our emissions with huge new taxes.
Specifically, asked Fielding: “Is it the case that carbon dioxide increased by 5 per cent since 1998 while global temperature cooled over the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?”
An excellent question, even if it’s more accurate to say the world has cooled since 2001, despite a big increase in the gases we’re told will make us fry.
So I thought the media might be interested in Wong’s remarkable response a week later, given that she now said we’d all been wrong to fret about the air temperature.
You see, “at time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend caused by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases”.
Translated, that means, sure, it might be cooling now, which we still refuse to actually confirm, but one day it will warm again, just like we said. Just wait.
===
Jackson’s licence
Andrew Bolt
Psychiatrist Robert M. Kaplan diagnoses Michael Jackson:
Jackson, we are told, was deprived of a childhood because of his early involvement in the music world and this, in some mysterious way, provided him with a lifelong excuse to perpetrate just about any self-indulgent, destructive, futile or mindless behaviour that an inordinately self-obsessed adult male who kept sleeping with young boys could wish to do for as long as he had the fame, money or credit to do it....
Jackson has eight siblings who were exposed to the same environment; why did none of them turn out the same way?… Jackson constantly branded his parents, especially his father, as “abusive”, the psychobabble word that conveys instant freedom from responsibility for the victim.... Considering the competition and pressures they faced, they would have had to be as hard on their charges as any parents of talented child stars. The results were little short of spectacular, and their children were given opportunities denied to many others…
Does any of this explain the star’s infantilism? Jackson did not have a sweet childlike nature, living in a perpetual Wendy world. Far from it. The evidence at his trial showed that he was a caricature of the cynical, calculated and predatory adult, soaked in booze and drugs, constantly conniving to manipulate children into a coercive environment where he could exploit them as he wished without bearing the consequences…
There is only one epitaph for Jackson. He was a disgrace: to his family, his people, his fans, his talent, his industry, his country and to every child who dreams of creating a better life for themselves as an adult without abdicating responsibility for their actions.
On the other hand, there’s this weasely tribute from President Barack Obama, with a spectacular misuse of the word “tragedy” to flatter both Jackson and his fans:
(Jackson) will go down in history as one of our greatest entertainers… I think that his brilliance as a performer also was paired with a tragic and, in many ways, sad personal life...I’m glad to see that he is being remembered primarily for the great joy that he brought to a lot of people through his extraordinary gifts as an entertainer.
===
He speaks so well that you forget it’s empty
Andrew Bolt
4:15am, Tuesday (Miami time): What President Barack Obama says in Moscow:
The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground.
7:45am, Tuesday (Miami time): What President Barack Obama does in Pakistan:
Suspected U.S. missiles ... attacked followers of a notorious militant leader close to the Afghan border,
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