One of NASA's next great adventures could take place with a raindrop-flecked camera bobbing around on extraterrestrial waves. Or at least, that's the hope of several researchers who want to sail an unmanned, nuclear-powered capsule on Saturn's moon Titan. Titan eerily resembles Earth with characteristics such as wind, rain and lakes, but all within the bounds of a frigid environment where liquid methane and ethane replace water. The many lakes dotting the moon's surface suggested an alternative mission proposal compared to the usual rovers and hard surface landers that NASA has sent to other destinations."We got funded to look at the possibility of sending a lake lander to Titan," said Ellen Stofan, a geologist with Proxemy Research in Maryland. "Scientifically, it's sort of a beyond obvious thing to do."
Muslim Spies in Capitol?
GOP lawmakers request probe into Council on American Islamic Relations, citing memo on plan to 'infiltrate' the Hill - under Obama we also get witch hunts. -ed.
School Chief Defends 'Obama Song'
Superintendent of N.J. district where video showed kids singing Obama's praises says school did nothing wrong
Liberals Increasingly Frustrated With Obama's Style and Performance
In recent weeks, President Obama has faced increasingly sharp criticism of his style and performance from an unlikely quarter: liberals.Liberal commentators from Saturday Night Live comedians to newspaper columnists to leftist bloggers to gay rights activists have been portraying Obama as a do-nothing president and "whiner-in-chief," expressing a growing concern that the commander in chief is not showing enough spine.Critics on the left are growing impatient with Obama and pressuring him to reject a request from his chief military commander for more troops in Afghanistan, to include a government-run insurance option in his health insurance reform plan and to lift the don't-ask-don't-tell policy concerning gays in the military.
PM eats biscuit, Twitters about it
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd is tackling the big issues - he's posted a picture of himself eating a biscuit on Twitter. - meanwhile, boatpeople are dying to come here - ed.
Street beggars face $6500 fines
PEOPLE begging for spare change could face a $6500 fine after state increases penalties 'in line with inflation'.
Muslim adviser has compo win
IKTIMAL Hage-Ali says she was racially abused by the police who were wrongfully holding her.
Drunk woman Penelope Woodbridge found guilty of manslaughter
A DRUNK driver who crashed her car and killed a mother-of-two while six times over the legal limit has been found guilty of manslaughter today.
What GFC? Fat cat bonuses are here again
SOME of Australia's top bankers are set to receive lavish pay packages this year.
Millions stolen from Macca's customers
MORE than $2.5m has been stolen in a credit card skimming scam at McDonald's outlets.
Pair charged with double murder named
TWO men charged with stabbing to death two men outside a Sydney pub after an argument have faced court for the first time, eight months after the incident.
Asylum-seekers refuse to leave boat
AFTER a month in the jungle and 13 days at sea, asylum-seekers say it's Australia or nothing.
American horror photographer Joshua Hoffine has gone to elaborate lengths to recreate his worst childhood fears, from manic clowns to monsters to insect infestations. See them - if you dare.
Italy's Mussolini 'was British secret agent'
ITALIAN dictator Benito Mussolini had a brief career as a British secret agent, the Guardian newspaper reported today, quoting research by a Cambridge University historian.
Taxpayer-funded news 'the future': ABC boss
THE taxpayer-funded ABC's internet content will remain free, chief executive Mark Scott said, at the same time scoffing at plans by media mogul Rupert Murdoch to charge for online material. - I don't like my tax funding the ABC. They are substandard and biased, - ed
Spying on your bills 'to help banks behave'
BLACK marks could soon be lodged on your files for missing just one credit card payment.
Wooden-spoon mum accused of assault
MUM hauled before police after disciplining her nine-year-old daughter with a wooden spoon.
Beer ad shows drunk Snow White in bed with dwarves
BLOWING smoke rings as she lies back in bed with seven semi-naked dwarves tucked alongside, it's Snow White like you've never seen before.
=== Journalists Corner ===
New Career for the Captain?
After his miracle landing on the Hudson, is this hero pilot about to take off in a different direction? Captain ?Sully? Sullenberger has answers!
===
Gore's "Global" Flaws?
Al Gore warned global warming was killing polar bears, then lost his "cool" when challenged! Why Dennis Miller says it's just the tip of the iceberg!
===
Guest: Ivanka Trump
Real estate, fashion & marketing! As the Donald's daughter builds her own brand, you won't believe which industry she's taking on next!
=== Comments ===
Rudd all talk but no real action on migrants
Piers Akerman
KEVIN Rudd will not apologise for “deploying the most hardline measures necessary to deal with the problems of illegal immigration to Australia”.
That’s OK. He has nothing to apologise for, because he has not deployed any hardline measures.
This is the usual pure rubbish. There is no such construct as illegal immigrants-how many times do you need to be told this? People have a right to seek asylum.- John, you are misleading and hyperbolic in your criticisms. The Pacific Solution worked well, and meant that many who might otherwise spend more time in dangerous refugee camps around the world were able to come to Australia than otherwise may have. You draw a false dichotomy in saying one might support Rudd or detention camps, because supporting Rudd is increasing the time spent in camps around the world for many people. Rudd's 'leadership' has meant that to come to Australia is expensive and dangerous (note people are dying for Rudd's policy that wouldn't have under the Pacific Solution). I want more immigrants. I want them to come to Australia in safety and security, knowing they will have the basic freedoms of maintaining loving relationships with their family and having the ability to prosper through their own initiative. But the Ruddites will be dribbling their usual bile of course. - ed.
Rudd himself has said that economic refugees would be sent back. What would you do? Resort to the Pacific solution? Resort again to the horrendous detention camps? Interestingly, the Liberals nake a lot of noise but not a peep out of them as regards what they would do.
The only apology required is from you-for deliberately trying to mislead. But the Akermaites will be dribbling their usual bile of course.
John of Adelaide
Didn’t Rudd recently pass an Act of Parliament to abolish the fees charged to certain illegal immigrants in detention centres?-Reggie, is your badly made point trying to assert that Rudd is secretly supported by members of the Liberal party? That is absurd. What may have happened is that some Liberal party members may have voted on their conscience, as is allowed for members of that party, but not for the ALP. The issue was political grandstanding by Rudd who has no problems with giving tax payer money away so long as he has access to substantial pork barrels. The press would have crucified the opposition had none of them made the same point as Rudd, without the profit that Rudd gets for the hypocrisy. But soon it won't be Rudd who people will see in charge of the ALP, because if he can't secure an early election he will have to resign before bills have to be paid .. and we still have no discussion about what creature will succeed Rudd in the ALP. - ed.
I think there were a number of Liberal politicians who cross the floor to vote with the Rudd Labor Govt. One was a female who is about to retire on the gravy train of taxpayer funded pension and was quite happy for taxpayers to pay the additional costs of some detainees.
Reggie
===
Alarmists filmed - and held to account
Andrew Bolt
Professor Bob Carter reviews Not Evil Just Wrong - The True Cost of Global Warming, the documentary which premieres around the world on October 18:
This documentary film is an examination of the human effects of environmental alarmism, with especial reference to the still hypothetical “problem” of human-caused global warming. The film is not so much about the science of climate change as it is about explaining the sociology and politics of what is now perhaps the world’s greatest-ever scare campaign.Why did it take a truck driver, rather than a scientist or journalist, to finally hold Gore to account? That says so very much that’s frightening.
Not Evil, Just Wrong examines the issue by interweaving three story lines throughout: first, that of an Ugandan woman who loses her son to malaria; second, the story of workers in a small American town whose employment and wealth is largely generated from the location there of a coal-fired power station, with mines nearby, both of which potentially face closure; and third, the story of the post-Vice Presidential career of Mr Al Gore, and his failure to answer the heartfelt concerns of a young US woman regarding the damage that his policies, if implemented, will wreak on ordinary Americans....
After a relentless opening passage of environmental soothsayers intoning their messages of doom and catastrophe, the film settles into a description of how powerful has been the influence on the global warming debate of Mr Gore’s science-fiction documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. Next is described the celebrated 2007 UK High Court case of Dimmock versus Her Majesty’s Secretary of State – in which a British truck driver challenged the government’s distribution of Mr Gore’s film for showing in all UK schools. The court found the film to be scientifically flawed, with 9 major errors, and ordered that if it was to be shown in schools then teachers were required to point out and discuss the errors that it contains.
I’ve met the film makers and greatly admired their previous documentary on green deceit, Mine Your Own Business. This film promises to be just as good:
The title Not Evil, Just Wrong is cleverly crafted, and based upon a statement made in the film about those environmentalists who were responsible for the banning of DDT. Undoubtedly, this thought may be fairly applied to many sincere environmentalists. And yet, “not evil, just wrong” is less accurate as a description of the many interested parties who are now gathered around the issue of human-caused global warming, in order to make money, or draw influence, from it. Ignorance of the law is no defense against culpability for a criminal offence, and neither should ignorance of science, however sincere, be a defence for the moral crimes that are being, or are about to be, perpetrated in the cause of “saving the world” from imaginary global warming.===
The greatest hurt of anti-carbon dioxide taxation, and related measures, will be imposed on third-world countries. As Nigel Lawson points out, those calling for massive carbon dioxide reduction are in fact “The enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world”.
America's Healthy Future
By Bill O'Reilly
On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee voted 14 to 9 to approve a piece of legislation called "America's Healthy Future Act."
If it eventually becomes law, the act would require all Americans to buy health insurance, and if you don't you get fined. If you're a small business owner and you have more than 50 workers, you've got to give them health coverage or you get fined.
The minutiae of the bill is just staggering, and "Talking Points" can't even begin to explain all of the specific parts of it. What I can tell you is that it will cost a ton of money, but most Americans will wind up with some kind of protection if they become ill.
The unintended consequences of government-mandated health insurance will be amazing, but nobody really knows how that will play out. The fundamental problem is that something has to be done to control health care costs. They are simply too high.
I believe increased competition in the private sector could have brought prices down. That was John McCain's vision.
But the nation voted Barack Obama into the White House, and it was clear from the very beginning of his campaign that the president wants the government to call the shots in health care. And that will happen to some extent, even though most Americans are uneasy with it.
According to a brand new Rasmussen poll, 50 percent of Americans oppose government-mandated health care; 44 percent favor it.
To blunt partisan anger, the Senate Finance bill does not have the so-called public option where the government would actually sell health insurance. But if passed into law, there will be non-profit co-ops where you can buy private insurance that is set up by the feds.
Again, that's all with an eye on driving health care prices down, which is a good thing for most Americans.
Despite that, "Talking Points" is very uneasy with the dramatic expansion of government under President Obama. With more than 300 million Americans needing to protect themselves from disease, chaos will happen under the banner of health care reform. It is inevitable.
Obviously we have chaos now, and only time will tell whether the federal cure will be worse than the private insurance disease.
===
INTENTION PURE
Tim Blair
The UK Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden on those bogus Rush quotes:
Which public figure can be quoted as having said something bigoted and disgusting and it doesn’t matter whether he did or not because he might have? Who can Big Media brand a racist without checking the facts? Who has to prove he did not say something racist, rather than the accuser proving he did?
A pat on the back for anyone who guessed the answer: Rush Limbaugh …
The irony is, of course, that the people reporting this as fact are the same types who are always denouncing bloggers and the internet as forces of evil intent on destroying proper journalism – proper journalism being the kind that involves checking facts.
Note the attribution: “On the radio”. Got a date for that, CNN? Hmm?
In the case of Rush Limbaugh, however, it seems to be enough that the intention (i.e. to show the talk radio host is a racist) is considered pure.Harnden notes a classic evasion from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Bryan Burwell, one of many who fell for the invented Rushisms:
He states that the quote seemed “so in character with the many things that Limbaugh has said before that we didn’t verify it …”In other words: Fake … but accurate!
===
LANCET MARCH
Tim Blair
The World March for Peace and Nonviolence began a couple of weeks ago in New Zealand and aims to end up in the Andes by January 10. During its journey, the “biggest world march ever known to mankind” recently stormed Bondi Beach:
“You’ll be part of a huge gathering,” promised John Butler. Well, just check out the hugeness. News agencies even hired aircraft to photograph this powerful message from the sky.
UPDATE. Speaking of hugeness, big Bob Ellis has thoughts on the Nobel Prize. It’s a triumph of self-parody.
===
JUST ASKING
Tim Blair
Since 1998, we bad humans have horked up some 120,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the sky. Actually, that’s just China, the US and Britain. The global total of human-caused carbon since ‘98 is probably around 300,000,000,000 tonnes. Which is only about five per cent of all the carbon produced, which means the total amount generated over 11 years is something like 6,000,000,000,000 tonnes.
So if carbon causes global warming, why isn’t the stupid globe getting any warmer?
UPDATE. Anglican leader and wool magnet Rowan Williams testifies:
People should use the climate change crisis as an opportunity to become human again, setting aside the addictive and self-destructive behaviour that has damaged their souls, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today.This holy beardo doesn’t seem to have heard that there ain’t no change and there ain’t no crisis. Let us now please return to the delightfully addictive and self-destructive damaging of souls.
===
LIGHT FINGER
Tim Blair
Inspired by comments, reader and contraband globe-stocker Tez flips the bird:
===
ABC ISN’T FREE
Tim Blair
The ABC’s Mark Scott says his organisation will “continue to provide free online news content”.
I must have missed the box you tick on tax forms so you can opt out of donating to this “free” service. As things stand, we’re currently delivering annual base funding of $698.7 million to Australia’s only compulsory subscription multi-media outfit.
===
FANTASY DESCRIBED
Tim Blair
According to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, without her “mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred” Michelle Malkin “would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”
I think he likes her. Too bad for Keith that she’s already married. To a man.
===
THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HUM
Tim Blair
“You can’t export an American car to China,” according to warmenist genius Sir Nicholas Stern. “It does not satisfy the emissions standards.” And Al Gore agrees. But what if an American car – a particularly large American car – becomes a Chinese car?
Hummer, the off-road vehicle that once epitomized America’s love for hulking trucks, is now in the hands of a Chinese heavy equipment maker.
I bet they’ll sell more Hummers in China than they do locally-built volt trolleys. In fact, they already do:
The H2 is very popular in China, I see a lot of them running around trough Beijing …
Why can’t Stern or Gore see them? Are they too small?
===
Student vs Moore. No contest
Andrew Bolt
Why does it take a student, rather than a journalist or film reviewer, to force Michael Moore to concede his beef isn’t exactly with capitalism, after all, but perhaps even the absence of it.
===
Or should Murdoch get government funding, too?
Andrew Bolt
Mark Scott can afford to be noble - with taxpayers’ money:
ABC managing director Mark Scott has taken a swipe at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s moves to charge for online content, describing News Limited as a “diminishing empire”.In fact, the ABC does charge for online content - but by making taxpayers foot the bill. Murdoch has no such luxury, and must pay for his own blogs by the income he can somehow squeeze out of them.
In a speech on the future of media in Melbourne last night, Mr Scott compared the News Limited boss to a “frantic emperor” who is trying to control the media as he always has, unaware that his power is long gone…
Mr Scott says the ABC will never charge for online content...
What Scott should address is the real public policy issue here: Is it healthy for governments to directly finance an online news service in direct competition with the online news services of private media companies?
===
The girl with the kind-of fathers
Andrew Bolt
If trained lawyers are confused and angry about who the parents are, what hope have the poor children?
A HOMOSEXUAL couple has been granted leave to appear before the Family Court in a bid to gain access to a girl who isn’t biologically related to either of them.I do admire, however, the commitment of the gay men to these children. Bravo.
The men, who cannot be named, have successfully argued that they are important people in the life of the three-year-old.
The girl, who likewise cannot be named, was not conceived with sperm from either of the men. But her mother was, until last year, in a same-sex relationship with another woman who does have a child conceived with one of the men’s sperm…
The case, known in court documents as Halifax, Fabian and Ors, has been described by the family psychologist as “complex"…
According to court documents, the two women were in a relationship for about seven years, during which time each had a child, to different fathers… According to court documents, Ms Fabian and Ms Halifax split when the (youngest) girl was 20 months old…
The magistrate accepted the mother’s argument that she was “less committed to the non-traditional family arrangement enthusiastically embraced by her former partner”. However, she said the mother had encouraged the men to have a relationship with her child while she was with the other woman.
She said the men were “publicly acknowledged as father figures” during the life of the relationship, while both women were the established “mother figures”.
===
Gillard: don’t dismiss Hanson’s fans as racists
Andrew Bolt
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has developed a more sophisticated and accurate analysis of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon - at least according to Washington Post writer EJ Dione:
Last week I caught up with Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who was visiting Washington for a conference on education. Though Gillard diplomatically avoided direct comment on American politics, she said what’s happening here reminded her of the rise of Pauline Hanson, who caused a sensation in Australian politics during the 1990s by creating One Nation, a xenophobic and protectionist political party tinged with racism.This, in fact, was precisely the strategy I advocated and John Howard adopted - to reject the racism of a minority of Hansonsites but to acknowledge and address the genuine grounds for grievance that many of her supporters actually had. Even Labor quietly tried to do the same (read on below for the evidence).
Gillard argues that high unemployment, particularly the displacement of men from well-paying jobs, helped unleash Hansonism and “the politics of the ordinary guy versus these elites - the opera-watching, latte-sipping elites”. Hansonism collapsed, partly because the Australian economy boomed. She said the key to battling the politics of rage is to acknowledge that it is driven by “real problems”, not simply raw feelings.
But try getting Gillard to concede that openly back home
===
The green question: how poorer do we want to be?
Andrew Bolt
Global warming believer Professor Bjorn Lomborg predicts failure at UN’s global warming conference at Copenhagen in December - especially given the failure of all the other hot-air festivals we’ve had before:
(I)mmediate promises of carbon cuts do not work. Seventeen years ago, industrialised nations promised with great fanfare in Rio de Janeiro to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Emissions overshot the target by 12 per cent. In Kyoto, leaders committed to a cut of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010. The failure to meet that target will most likely be even more spectacular, with emissions overshooting by about 25 per cent.Here’s why no sane government is going to slash emissions any time soon to the levels the green campaigners demand:
This year, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre commissioned research from top climate economists examining feasible ways to respond to global warming… The centre convened an expert panel of five of the world’s leading economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, to consider all of the new research and identify the best - and worst - options.===
The panel found that expensive, global carbon taxes would be the worst option. This finding was based on a groundbreaking research paper that showed that even a highly efficient global CO2 tax aimed at fulfilling the ambitious goal of keeping temperature increases below 2C would reduce annual world GDP by a staggering 12.9per cent, or $US40 trillion ($43.7trillion), in 2100. The total cost would be 50 times that of the avoided climate damage. And if politicians choose less-efficient, less-co-ordinated cap-and-trade policies, the costs could escalate a further 10 to 100 times.
Steady, both of you
Andrew Bolt
I’m not a smacker, and the girl is surely too old for such crude treatment:
A MUM was warned by police she could be charged with assault with a weapon for disciplining her nine-year-old daughter with a wooden spoon.And yet I wonder if there was enough context to this to warrant going straight to police. Is the girl now better off?
The mother was dobbed in by a school support worker after her daughter revealed during a classroom discussion on bullying that she had been smacked.
A shocked Claire Davidson yesterday told how the support worker, employed to deal with rampant bullying at Yea Primary School in Melbourne, referred the family directly to police.
UPDATE
And yet: nine years old? Hit, and with a spoon? Isn’t it someone’s duty to discipline not the girl, but the parents? As for any readers who may boast that they smack, too, may I ask what it is lacking in the example you set and the reason you’ve been granted that a hand raised in violence must make good?
===
Spin overboard
Andrew Bolt
From the seas come Kevin Rudd’s reckoning - the great unravelling of his spin:
AUSTRALIAN authorities are tracking about six asylum boats suspected to be on their way to Australia after the federal government revealed that organised-crime syndicates were responsible for the “vast majority” of boats reaching Australia.Yet more evidence he was warned:
In May, opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis asked then-AFP commissioner Mick Keelty if he was familiar with the report, “Strategic forecast for transnational criminal trends and threats”. During Senate estimates exchange, Senator Brandis asked if the report contained the sentence: “Reporting indicates that people-smugglers will market recent changes to Australia’s immigration policy to entice potential illegal immigrants. This may cause a rise on the number of attempted arrivals.”Also more evidence that spin rather than reason is driving the Government:
Mr Keelty refused to answer. Yesterday, the opposition pointed to a question on notice from the AFP confirming the document’s existence..
But as the Prime Minister continued his attack on the previous government’s policies, he was forced to hose down reports his government was considering reopening Howard-era detention centres.Yet more spin: Rudd attacked and then noisly closed Howard’s “Pacific solution” - sending boat people to Nauru to deny them the victory of staying here. Now Rudd is having the boat people detained in Sumatra instead, which changes only the island, not the Howard policy:
Mr Rudd said there were no plans to reopen the Baxter detention centre in South Australia… Yesterday, a Defence spokesman told The Australian plans to reopen Baxter had been considered in early talks between Defence and Immigration but subsequently ruled out. But within 15 minutes the spokesman called back claiming Defence had been in error...
Indonesian immigration officials were yesterday preparing space in a detention centre, likely to be one in Sumatra recently refurbished with Australian funds, to process the Sri Lankans refusing to leave their cargo chip in the port of Merak, where it had been towed by the Indonesia navy...And even more spin may be unravelling:
A navy intelligence source told The Australian that the original order to search for the ship came on Friday directly from the Co-ordinating Minister for Politics, Justice and Security, General Widodo AS. This contradicted a claim that it was information from Mr Rudd at the weekend that tipped the Indonesians off to the asylum-seeker boat’s existence.UPDATE
Paul Toohey isn’t buying the spin, either:
It is hard to see an substantive difference between the Indonesian and Pacific solutions, except if you are in Indonesia, rather than on Nauru or Manus, you have a better chance of slipping quietly away and paying a people-smuggler for passage to Australia.And Toohey recalls what he discovered in Indonesia last month:
The Australian met a man in Indonesia last week who was trying to get to Australia. He says he knows of two Iraqi brothers who came through Indonesia and are now in Australia after going through the 90-day process on Christmas Island. The man claims the brothers are formers members of the Shia Mahdi Army and had talked about - proudly, according to this source - the kidnapping of Sunni Muslims in Baghdad and taking them to Sadr City to be tortured.
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