A decision by the Obama administration to deny federal funding to a group that keeps track of human rights abuses in Iran is a misguided attempt by the White House to appear non-confrontational with the Islamic republic, critics say.
Don't do it, top sailor warns Jessica Watson
ONE of the world's leading yachtsmen has written to teenage sailor Jessica Watson, urging her not to try to sail solo around the world and warning she has one chance in three of losing her boat or her life. - there is a worse chance of facing lives lost and more when we vote in an ALP government - ed.
'F--- off', Packer tells Seven boss
JAMES Packer's anger at Seven's news coverage of him boils over at an old mate's birthday party.
Kamahl: Hey Hey it's the same old rubbish
SINGER says he was subjected to years of racist remarks for the sake of comedy on Hey Hey.
Baby facing rehab with alcoholic mum
A SEVEN-week-old baby could be forced to stay with his alcoholic mother amid claims DOCS wants to save time and money.
'Feminist' who stood by her cheating man
NOTHING submissive about standing by cheating husband, says Labor MP Belinda Neal. - feminists are the new doormats - ed.
'Hitman' crime show host goes missing
A TV presenter accused of ordering assassinations to boost ratings has fled, police say.
Sydney v Brisbane debate led to bashing
A TRIVIAL dispute over whether Brisbane is better than Sydney has left a celebrated baker fighting for his life in hospital.
Astor son stole sick mum's millions
THE son of a millionaire socialite has been found guilty of stealing over $60m from his mother when she suffered alzheimers.
=== Journalists Corner ===
"Does the H1N1 flu scare the heck out of you as much as it does me? "
The shots are supposedly safe for our kids, grandparents and ourselves...
Beck's caution over the cure!
===
Guest: Sen. Tom Carper
As the Senate picks over the Baucus Bill ... are both sides getting confused by the fine print?
===
Swine Flu Vaccine Fears!
Is the medicine totally safe? Or is it too soon to know the true side effects? Bill gets answers!
===
Passing Health Care
The plan, the particulars, and the price tag - What's really holding Washington back from passing a health care bill?
=== Comments ===
GILLARD IS RUDD, OBAMA IS BUSH (?)
Tim Blair
While conservatives are frustrated by warmy pushovers like Malcolm Turnbull, leftists are increasingly annoyed by Saint Barry, Planet Healer:
Obama has distressingly begun to resemble George W Bush …So says the New Statesman, whose cover idea has previously been explored by numerous others – notably Leonard Newman III in March. - a highly misleading appearance in the issue of Obama and President Bush. Tim apparently believes that President Bush is a fool. Obama merely appears to be ineffective, President Bush was never ineffective.The drawn demarcation is unfair by Tim. Neither Mr Turnbull nor President Bush are incompetent or facile. Mr Turnbull has a vastly improved ETS policy than Rudd, but Rudd will get Kudos from Tim, while Mr Turnbull gets bricbacs because Mr Turnbull apparently should know better. Meanwhile, President Bush is derided despite his clear policy successes and Obama is associated with that decent man because of the areligious lobby of which Obama is a part.
The distance between Obama and Bush on a host of policies is not as great as many people might hope or have expected – and it appears to get narrower by the day.
It is true that an ETS policy at all is as useful as a bycycle to a goldfish, but the misleading press campaigns in support of greenoid fascism is what needs to be addressed before we are all run over as the previous Howard Government was. Also it is true That President Bush tried too hard to be statesman and sounded foolish at times, but the stupid press carried on a cowardly campaign that no one could have survived. Yet President Bush was an effective agent of change despite all the odds, and the acrimony and hubris of the left wing liberal press. - ed.
===
TIME’S UP, BEAR
Tim Blair
So far, Nassur has proved surprisingly resilient ...
... but that might change if rumour spreads that he’s a collaborator.
===
Polanski’s ugly defenders
Andrew Bolt
The arrest of director Roman Polanski - who drugged, sodomised and raped a 13-year-old girl - triggered outrage from a class of people who seemed to me to treat this as somehow an attact on them and their privileges. How dare Swiss police arrest one of their own. A fellow artist. A proivider of their preferred brand of films.
The most astonishing example of this bugger-the-girl (literally) selfishness came from the appalling Whoopi Goldberg:
WHOOPI GOLDBERG, CO-HOST, “THE VIEW”: He was charged — I know it wasn’t rape-rape… I think it was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.I’d thought the most flagrantly self-interested defender of Polanski was Woody Allen, the director who seduced the adopted daughter of his girlfriend and then married her.
But no, it turns out instead to be the French Culture Minister instead - who turns out to represent a very different and more predatory culture than you might have suspected:
France’s culture minister is struggling to keep his job amid an uproar about a 2005 book in which he details Bangkok’s brothels and the pleasure and freedom of paying boys for sex.How did a politician - even a French one - manage for so long to escape any consequence for writing a confession of that kind?
Frederic Mitterrand’s candid tale came back to haunt him after he jumped to the defense of filmmaker Roman Polanski, currently in a Swiss prison on U.S. charges relating to his sexual liaison with a 13-year-old girl when he was 43…
The book, “La mauvaise vie” or “The Bad Life,” is described as an autobiography and includes anecdotes about his family and his travels. Mitterrand recounts being taunted in childhood by peers and being troubled by his attraction to other boys. In Bangkok, surrounded by “boys” or “kids” who tell him in broken English “I want you happy,” he finds a liberty he never had when he was a child.
“Money and sex, I am at the heart of my system, that which is functioning at last, because I know that no one will refuse me. ... I can at last choose. The Western morality, the endless guilt, the shame that I drag with me, shatter,” one passage reads.
Soon after the book came out, Mitterrand said on France-3 television that he was not a pedophile and used the term “boys” loosely.
===
Why Obama won’t slash emissions, too
Andrew Bolt
Slashing emissions to “save” the planet is expensive. Very expensive, since it not only chokes growth but demands huge new investments in alternative forms of “green” power.
And right now the United States, the world’s second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, cannot afford to spend one more red - or green - cent:
The federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week, congressional analysts said Wednesday.You think the US can really afford another green tax slug of up to $300 billion a year - and a cut in GDP of 1 per cent - on top of that? - Obama will do it if there is a pork barrel for it. Obama is not his own man. He wasn't when he was captured by Chicago mob interests, nor is he now that he is captured by corrupt socialist interests. Obama has no concern over the environment or his own constituents voters, but those he owes for putting him in power. - ed.
The Congressional Budget Office estimate, while expected, is bad news for the White House and its allies in Congress as they press ahead with health care overhaul legislation that could cost $900 billion over the next decade.
The unprecedented flood of red ink flows from several factors, including a big drop in tax revenues due to the recession, $245 billion in emergency spending on the Wall Street bailout and the takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then there is almost $200 billion in costs from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, as well as increases in programs such as unemployment benefits and food stamps.
The previous record deficit was $459 billion and was set just last year.
===
Forgive Bush this success
Andrew Bolt
Just updating you on those gleeful claims that Iraq was now headed for civil war, thanks to George Bush’s wicked toppling of Saddam Hussein.
Iraqi civilian deaths last month: 96 - the lowest since the invasion.I wonder what the death toll in Iraq would be were genocidal Saddam or his madder sons still in power. Say 3000 a month?
Coalition deaths over the past three months: 25 - the lowest since the invasion.
At some stage, surely, some journalists should write an apology. And does Kevin Rudd now stand by his claim two years ago that ending Iraq’s totalitarian nightmare and ridding the West of a terror-sponsoring tyrant was the ”greatest ... national security policy disaster that our country has seen since Vietnam”?
And here’s one last question: had the terrorists not been so encouraged by the viciously anti-Bush doom-mongers of the Western media, some in my opinion dangerously useful to the killers, might fewer Iraqis have died? (For examples of the kind of reporting I mean, read on for a piece from the files.)
UPDATE
No one can accuse Barack Obama, on the other hand, of standing up against dictators and fighting for freedom. From James Morrow:
It says a lot about a president’s priorities when he approves sending $400,000 of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to “foundations” run by Muammar Qaddafi’s kids, but cuts off funding to an Iranian human rights group which had, to date, been diligently documenting the human rights abuses committed by the atomically aspirational Tehran regime…===
In recent weeks and months he has broken precedent and refused to meet with the Dalai Lama to avoid rubbing Beijing the wrong way. He has stuck his nose in the affairs of a sovereign Latin American nation, Honduras, in support of Manuel Zelaya - a Hugo Chavez wannabe whose supporters are full of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
He has sold out the democracies of Eastern Europe to appease a resurgent Russia offended by America’s missile defence plans…
Today, as demonstrated by Barack Obama’s recent speech to the UN General Assembly, his discomfort with the idea of American “victory” in Afghanistan, and his clear over-arching desire to consign notions of American exceptionalism to the dustbin of history, it is clear that the US under the current administration is more concerned about being one of the guys than standing up for principle.
Stimulating objection
Andrew Bolt
Professor Sinclair Davidson:
Anyone who wishes to claim that the stimulus package has staved off an Australian recession needs to explain why similar policies have failed everywhere else.
Chris Berg:
So there’s a lot of assumptions you have to make to believe that the specific mix of stimulus spending and industry support enacted by the Rudd government has been the only successful mix in the world.
Julie Novak:
The dream of governments being able to create, support or guarantee jobs without harming the job-generating properties of the private sector is not based on economic reality…
The statistical evidence is showing that the fiscal stimulus has been ineffective so far in delivering masses of sustainable, real jobs. The number of people engaged by the retail sector nationally, which was the primary beneficiary of the $900 cash splashes, fell by 51,700 over the 12 months to August this year. Meanwhile, job losses in construction have totalled about 15,000 over the same period despite huge government projects getting under way.
===
Palin sells
Andrew Bolt
The lady is still hot, hot, hot:
Fans and foes alike are hoping for surprises in Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, which leapfrogged Dan Brown and Glenn Beck to the top of the Amazon.com best-seller list last week before even being published.
No Republican politician around can command her size of crowd. The question for the party is: does interest translate to votes? If so…
===
8th Anniversary of Afghan War
By Bill O'Reilly
There was no doubt after 9/11 that the Bush administration had to reply with force. The logical target was the Taliban in Afghanistan who gave Al Qaeda free reign to train and launch the terror attacks. On October 7, 2001, President Bush said this:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH: On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against the Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
The Taliban were quickly overthrown with minimal American casualties and the USA celebrated a great victory. But eight years later, things are not so great in Afghanistan, and now President Obama owns the war:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting, this is fundamental to the defense of our people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
And that remains true. If the Taliban prevails in Afghanistan, it will again become a terror haven. There's no question about that.
But there are plenty of questions about how President Obama is waging the war. Right now he is still deciding whether to send 40,000 more troops to the theater, troops requested by his hand-picked commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. If Barack Obama does not send the forces, there will be a major controversy. And if things get worse in Afghanistan, President Obama will be blamed.
This is a potential third rail for the president.
Part of the problem for Mr. Obama is his left-wing base, people like Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi are not committed to more troops, despite the fact that Mrs. Pelosi said this about President Bush:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NANCY PELOSI, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: I remind you the president, when General Shinseki said that you need 300,000 troops in order to get the job done and come home safely and soon, he was fired. So this president saying that he listens to the commanders in the field, I don't know about that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Again, that was Mrs. Pelosi talking about President Bush in Iraq. But now President Obama's in the exact same situation, is he not?
According to the latest FOX News Poll, 50 percent of Americans do not believe the president is doing what it takes to win in Afghanistan; 37 percent say he is doing enough. But on the subject of more troops, the nation is divided: 43 percent say send them, 43 percent say bring them home.
After eight long years, things should be much better in Afghanistan, but now is not the time to surrender. NATO is impotent. Only Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark allow their troops to launch offensive operations. That's insane.
So it, once again, falls to the USA to keep the world safe from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We'll see if President Obama is up to the task.
===
GAG WAR
Tim Blair
Tracey Spicer examines a certain televisual incident, among other outrages.
UPDATE. Apparently we’ve sickened America.
===
NO WONDER HE LIKES IT
Tim Blair
It’s just like a big, colourful Teleprompter.
UPDATE. In other cultural news, Iowahawk’s brilliant $33.18 art contest – featuring spectacular entries from America’s most prestigious trailer parks – now receives an Australian contribution:
If this doesn’t win, it is because of racism.
===
WHAT FOR?
Tim Blair
Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. - will he share it with the IPCC? - ed
===
The $65 million question: has Rudd been too soft?
Andrew Bolt
This is becoming very, very expensive:
BORDER protection authorities have intercepted yet another boatload of asylum-seekers off Australia’s northwest coast, the 31st vessel to be detected this year… On board were 52 passengers and three crew…Former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews makes a contrast with the number of boat people in the last five years of the Howard Government:
So far this year, 1649 passengers have arrived by boat, ferried by a total of 64 crew members.
Since 2002, there were less than 250 illegal boat arrivals.Is the Rudd Government absolutely sure it didn’t send out the wrong signal last year in softening our laws against this kind of thing? One small mercy, I guess: “only” 25 people have since drowned in trying to get here.
But the cost to taxpayers is enormous, to judge by figures released in May by the Government:
When calculated over the October-February period, the numbers show authorities spent more than $5.3 million on the 141 people who were in detention as of February 28 - or $38,000 a detainee.That suggests the boat arrivals just this year alone have cost us around $65 million.
===
Why greens can’t be trusted
Andrew Bolt
Green activism always struck me as a no-sweat morality, in which you got the moral kudos for demanding that others make the sacrifices. So no surprise here:
Psychologists in Canada have revealed new research suggesting that people who become eco-conscious “green consumers” are “more likely to steal and lie” than others.Which may help to explain why the global warming faith is the first major religion to be led almost entirely by the worst sinners. For instance:
The new study comes from professor Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and her colleague Chen-Bo Zhong.
“Those lyin’, cheatin’ green consumers,” begins the statement from the university. “Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up ‘moral credentials’ in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.”
UPDATE
Talking about the untrustworthiness of green activists, Indur Golkany catches out The Economist playing games with facts:
The Economist’s article, A bad climate for development (September 17), which also serves as a backgrounder for an online debate on climate change, is not only selective in the information it presents, it is riddled with speculation and unsubstantiated claims.And that’s just the first of four disreptuable ways The Economist tried to scare its readers about global warming. Read on.
For example, its chart 3 presents portions of two of three panels in figure 2.1 of the World Development Report 2010. But the panel that it chooses not to display shows that deaths from all climate related disasters have actually declined at least since 1981–85 despite (a) an enormous increase in the population at risk, namely, the world’s population, and (b) the fact that older data has a greater tendency to underestimate the number and casualties of extreme weather events.
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