Try as he might, Nathan Rees cannot escape speculation that he's on borrowed time as NSW premier. - Channel 9 announced the fact that Mr Reese would be disendorsed by senior ALP members of the right, ending his premiership by Monday. - ed.
Pakistan Taliban chief dead
PAKISTAN Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud died this month after a US missile strike, militant commander Hakimullah has confirmed, declaring himself the new leader of the militia.
School forces pupils to drink tap water
A SCHOOL has banned bought bottled water, despite worries over "dodgy" container reuse. - Rudd and Reese campaigned for this outcome. - ed.
Rudd condemns 'cowardly' attack on MP
Rudd has condemned violence against women after one of his female MPs was allegedly punched by her partner.
Terror supporters told to stand or leave
The decision by two Islamic alleged terrorists and their supporters not to stand when required in court was not based on religion but designed to make a political point, a magistrate says.
Woman 'felt justified in poisoning kids'
A Sydney woman who killed her children with rat poison felt her husband's infidelity justified her actions, a court has been told.
Boy stabs mother's partner in the face
A teenage boy used a kitchen knife to stab his mother's "intoxicated and obnoxious" partner in the face, a court has been told.
Texting and driving - the graphic ad 2 die 4
A BRITISH ad on the dangers of texting while driving is the most graphic yet, but one road safety expert says if it saves just one life then it’s a good ad.
Rose planted in memory of Jane McGrath
A delicate pink rose inspired by the late Jane McGrath has been planted in one of her favourite Sydney locations as a living tribute to her memory.
'Ted' Kennedy dies of brain cancer
US Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy has died of brain cancer at the age of 77. - may the US never again be subject to the corrupt activity of a wealthy family. - ed.
Steve Irwin key to scientist's discovery
Scientists have descended on a series of unique springs found on a wetland reserve created by the......
Huge fares take commuters for a ride
It is claimed Sydney commuters are getting their money's worth, despite a new report showing they......
New twist over drunk 'technical rape'
Prosecutors in a controversial rape case have admitted they were wrong to say a drunken woman......
=== Journalists Corner ===
Attacking the airwaves!
How the FCC plans to muzzle conservative talk radio... and the impact on free speech in the media industry.
===
Miley Tongue Tied?
Body Language looks at the teen queen's reaction when asked about her former flame!
===
Guest: Gov. Tim Pawlenty
Hidden costs, add-ons and red tape. Tim Pawlenty on the real price of health care reform!
===
The Perfect Health Care Plan?
Michael Steele on why the GOP's plan is just what the doctor ordered!
=== Comments ===
TED KENNEDY
Tim Blair
Senator Ted Kennedy has died at 77.
===
WHO’S THE INFIDELS NOW, BITCHES?
Tim Blair
Raw combat footage (and commentary) from Afghanistan:
===
BUSINESS GETS BUSY
Tim Blair
Nationals senator Ron Boswell calls on Australian industry to defend itself against Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scam:
It is in the hands of business now: whether it wants to see Australian industry eaten away inch by inch through a Senate-controlled ETS or whether it will stand firm against it. If business fails to hold the line that enabled us to block the ETS the first time, then the Labor-Greens alliance will carve up its investments.
The Nationals are not alone on this. We have many Liberals on side. A strong and public show of leadership from business will seal the fate of the ETS.
More strength to them. And in the US:
The nation’s largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.
Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century”—complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
“It would be evolution versus creationism,” said William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”
Bring. It. On. Meanwhile, greenoid Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull keeps trying to lure business to the dumb side:
Emboldened by a lift in his Newspoll ratings, Mr Turnbull challenged colleagues today, telling a business breakfast in Melbourne: “Those people who say an emissions trading scheme is an anathema must have been asleep during the last term of the Howard government.
“Not only did we establish an emissions trading scheme, which is a market-based way of putting a price on carbon, we commenced legislating for it. It remains our policy.”
And hasn’t it worked out well. Your party lost the last election, Malcolm. And you’ll lose the next one.
UPDATE. Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce:
“I can tell you the mood is changing,” the senator told this column about Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. “I am now getting hundreds of emails a day from people. They hate this [ETS] policy. They just hate it. It was marvellous when it was a thought bubble but people are saying, ‘We can hardly afford to live in our home.’ People see this as madness. And they actually get the gist of it. They know it’s a new tax and they are asking: ‘How does putting another new tax on me change the temperature of the globe?’
“And the more they think about it, the madder they get. In the coal industry they know it’s a new tax that will cost their jobs. In rural Australia they know it’s a new tax that will send them broke.”
Rural Australia’s population isn’t as dense as you’ll find in the inner cities.
===
OBVIOUS FACT OBSERVED
Tim Blair
Former treasurer Peter Costello enjoys an ABC moment:
I was doing an ABC radio interview last week. A listener sent in a text message - which was read out - suggesting the ABC should engage me as a radio host. I said: “I don’t think I have the right political views for the ABC.” It was not said with any malice, just an observation of an obvious fact …
When I dropped my inconvenient truth in last week’s interview it didn’t provoke any outrage or comment. It just hung there. There was a mild effort by my interlocutor to defend the corporation. He pointed out there is a Liberal employed on ABC local radio in Perth. Which says it all. It is quite an oddity that they know about this man in Melbourne. Out of the 4500 ABC employees, they know there is one Liberal.
To be fair, the ABC also employs Michael Duffy, a friend of mine often described as conservative. He votes Green.
===
LET THE PEOPLE DRIVE
Tim Blair
Deepak Lal sticks it to progress-denying Western eco-imperialists:
Nothing is more hypocritical and immoral than rich Westerners driving their gas-guzzling SUVs emoting about the threat to Spaceship Earth from the millions of Indians who want to drive Nanos. Whilst the salving of their consciences by buying carbon offsets (as Al Gore claims to do every time he jets around the world) is akin to the Papal indulgences sold by the Catholic Church, which allowed its richer adherents to assuage their guilt and ‘fornicate on clean sheets’.
For Gore to have the lights on his mansion blazing throughout the night, and seek to restrict the emissions from Indian power stations, when most Indians don’t even have an electric light bulb, is deeply wicked.
A recent edition of Car, the ethically-poisoned once-readable Brit mag, mentioned that the Tata Nano would provide Indians with inexpensive transport “for better or for worse”. The same magazine seems just fine with English people owning all the cars they want. And now India is catching up:
Indian car sales jumped by nearly a third in July – the country’s sixth monthly rise in car sales – as new model launches and cheaper loans prompted customers to flock to automobile showrooms.
Think of this as offsets to carbon offsets. India is working while we whine.
===
TWO TONS
Tim Blair
It’s been a long, strange journey for British Labour politician John Prescott:
In 1999, as Secretary of State for Transport, Mr Prescott was criticised for taking an official car 250 yards from his hotel to the Labour party conference centre.
But now:
John Prescott has landed his most bizarre job yet – as professor of climate change at a Chinese university.
Prezza has confounded his critics with his new role at Xiamen University on the south east coast of the country where he will give occasional lectures on global warming.
Prescott’s qualified to lecture on so much more:
He was originally nicknamed Two Jags due to his personal Jaguar car and his ministerial Jag.
The nickname later became Two Jabs when he punched a protester who threw an egg on him in 2001. And it later turned into Two Shags when he had an affair with his secretary Tracey Temple behind wife Pauline’s back.
The tubby Labourite will deliver his first climate change lecture on September 9. Mr Eugenides asks: “I wonder how he plans to commute to his lectures on climate change.” Why, possibly in a private jet, funded by another project:
He is also working on an eco-film along the lines of ex-US vice president Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
They’ve got a great deal in common.
===
IT WAS A FULL-SCALE RIOT IS WHAT IT WAS
Tim Blair
An old-fashioned Alabammy hootenanny:
Two Alabama families that had been fighting for years turned their feud into a full-scale riot Monday outside a small-town city hall, with up to 150 screaming people hurling tire irons and wielding baseball bats.
Eight people were arrested, and at least four were hurt, Trooper John Reese said. Two were taken to hospitals. The town’s police chief was hit in the head with a crowbar but was OK.
The two- or three-year-old feud apparently prompted a fight earlier in the day at a high school, after a window was shot out of a home Sunday night. Then, “all hell broke loose” later in the day, said Sgt. Carlton Hogue of the Perry County Sheriff’s Department.
“It was a full-scale riot is what it was,” said Tony Long, mayor of the town of 3,300 about 85 miles west of Montgomery.
According to Hogue, rioters were “throwing jack irons, throwing tire irons, anything they could get their hands on.”
The mayor said he wasn’t sure what sparked the fracas.
“Everybody’s trying to point the finger at everybody,” he said.
They were doing rather more than that. I once made the innocent mistake, in a Victorian country town, of mentioning a member of a certain local family who had made a name for himself in Australian Rules Football. The table fell silent. Eventually, a matriarch spoke: “We do not discuss those people in this house.”
Much later, I asked another elder about the source of the feud. He couldn’t remember.
===
RIGHT REJECTED
Tim Blair
Only last week, this site noted with concern the tragedy of global roadal divergence:
We drive on different sides of the road …
Samoa now steps forward to set things right … er, left:
Sometime in the early morning hours of Sept. 7, residents of this small Pacific island nation will stop their cars, take a deep breath, and do something most people would think is suicidal: Start driving on the other side of the road …
The main reason for Samoa’s switch is that two of its biggest neighbors, Australia and New Zealand, drive on the left-hand side, whereas Samoa currently drives on the right, as in the U.S. By aligning with Australia and New Zealand, the prime minister says, it will be easier for poor Samoans to get cheap hand-me-down cars from the 170,000 or so Samoans who live in those two countries.
It’s ”cash for clunkers”, except the clunkers stay on the road, where they belong. Hidebound right-laners, however, oppose the change:
Opponents have organized two of the biggest protests in Samoan history, and a new activist group – People Against Switching Sides, or PASS – has geared up to fight the plan.
They’d really lose it if Samoa introduced the hook turn, a charming Melbourne manoeuvre whereby one turns right from the left lane. Some of us have performed that same move politically.
===
HOPE AND CHANGE
Tim Blair
Hollywood was different in 1940: - and better - ed.
===
On expecting a mass killer to be “sensitive”
Andrew Bolt
LET Kenny MacAskill explain himself how stupid - how criminally clueless - he was to have freed Abdul Baset Ali Al Megrahi.
Al Megrahi is the Libyan intelligence agent who just eight years ago was found guilty of planting a bomb on a passenger jet that exploded over Lockerbie, killing 270 people.
And MacAskill is the Scottish Justice Secretary who this week freed him out of “compassion”, because the poor mass murderer now has cancer.
MacAskill says he is now surprised and dismayed that Al Megrahi, on returning to Libya, was not only given a hero’s reception by the country’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, but was seen saluting cheering crowds.
Good lord, he protested. Al Megrahi promised he wouldn’t celebrate his release. He was showing the families of his 270 victims “no sensitivity”.
Is MacAskill mad? Did this fool really expect a twice-convicted killer to show sensitivity?
The more we learn about the freeing of Al Megrahi the more unreal—and recklessly dangerous—it seems.
===
President Obama on Vacation
By Bill O'Reilly
Following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, Mr. Obama will take a week off on Martha's Vineyard with his family. The president will rest and recharge, and boy does he need it.
The health care chaos has damaged the president's credibility and his job approval ratings as well. The latest Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll has 28 percent of Americans strongly approving of the job the president is doing, with 40 percent strongly disapproving. That, of course, is not good.
As far as health care is concerned, there is another significant problem coming down the road. Forcing Americans to buy health insurance of any kind may be unconstitutional. According to a number of scholars, the feds can't force us to buy anything. Just another annoying thing for the president to consider as he enjoys his $35,000 a week estate in the Chilmark section of the Vineyard.
By the way, the Obamas are paying most of the rent themselves, as the president made big bucks from his books.
"Talking Points" hopes the Obamas have a good time and that the president understands not all of those who oppose his policies are doing so for nefarious reasons. Yes, there are some who despise the president, but most of us want what is best for the country, and bankrupting it certainly does not fit that mindset. With the president paying so much for a week of leisure, he might think about money a bit, because it looms large in the health care debate.
Finally, the president must know that his health care vision is in serious trouble and he must adjust quickly. Blaming dissenters and news agencies like FOX who do not demean legitimate protest actually hurts the president.
On Monday, "Factor" producer Jesse Watters asked presidential spokesman Bill Burton this:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JESSE WATTERS, "FACTOR" PRODUCER: Why does the administration seem to be so thin-skinned with regards to FOX News?
BILL BURTON, PRESIDENTIAL SPOKESMAN: Thin-skinned? That's interesting. I wouldn't say they were thin-skinned. I would say that we — we appreciate that there are people not just at FOX, but in all aspects of the media who are — who come to this with sometimes very sharp opinions, sometimes very tough questions. And the president has, in the past, obviously been happy to take tough questions.
WATTERS: It seems like on a number of occasions, we've been singled out for maybe being a little more critical than some the other cable networks and some of the other media outlets. Is that a strategy, or is that more haphazard?
BURTON: Yeah, like I said, I don't agree with the premise of your question. And so I wouldn't really know how to answer.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
With all due respect, I think Mr. Burton is being a tad disingenuous.
No comments:
Post a Comment