THE Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church is fighting for survival after a catastrophic loss of $160 million on its once bountiful share portfolio. - he may not have intended to, but Jensen endorsed Rudd over Mr Howard at the last federal election. He similarly endorsed Iemma over Mr Debnam and historically has always endorsed the ALP. Yet the people he endorsed were not committed Christians, while those he overlooked were. He needs better discernment if he is to lead Sydney Anglicans effectively. -ed
Usain Bolt shows off his cricket skills during charity match
THE world's fastest man has proved his prowess with leather and willow, hitting West Indies captain Chris Gayle for a straight six before clean bowling his compatriot.Bolt revealed his love for cricket at the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he told reporters he was a huge fan of former Australian opener Matthew Hayden.
Retrial likely as Brimble jury split
DIANNE Brimble's children "aren't coping well" with news the trial into her death may start again. - this is a predictable outcome. The reason being that the NSW Police force bungled the investigation from the start, so that the evidence simply is not available even though Mrs Brimble clearly met an end at the hands of a foul creature that should not be allowed sunlight. - ed.
Teen shot dead, man 'ingested substance'
A 14-YEAR-OLD girl is dead and two people are in hospital in what police say "might have had some sort of siege situation".
Corrupt cops stole drugs, extorted money
TWO policemen extorted tens of thousands of dollars from Sydney tobacconists and stole drugs from crime scenes, NSW's Police Integrity Commission has found.
Rail journey the same ol' crush
FED-UP commuters say CityRail's new timetable has added up to an hour to their travelling day because express services are now stopping at more stations.
Taxpayers foot bill for botched $2m ad
A $2 MILLION economic stimulus advertising campaign will be investigated following a series of embarrassing revelations.
Mums who drink warned they risk serious long-term damage
BUSY mums who enjoy a wine to ease the stress of daily living have been warned they risk serious long-term damage.
Toddler pines for lost playmate
A TODDLER who witnessed her three-year-old playmate fall to his death from a window is pining for the boy, her mother says.
Staff flee 'horror boss' Bryce in droves
ONE-THIRD of the Governor-General's staff has left in the past year, prompting fresh criticism of how Quentin Bryce operates.
Hugging banned at primary school
STUDENTS have been banned from hugging at a primary school for fear it sets a bad example.
Croc hunter's $40m zoo to open in US
CROC hunter Steve Irwin's dream of opening an Aussie zoo in the United States is to be realised, three years after his death.
Ben Cousins on driving charge
BEN Cousins is back in trouble after allegedly crashing his car into an elderly driver's vehicle.
Airport lands $2m as we're waiting
SYDNEY Airport could reap nearly $2 million a year by herding 2000 drivers a day into a new "pick-up area" that costs $7 for stays of more than 10 minutes. Is this fair?
Wheelchair-bound man left on mountain
A WHEELCHAIR-bound man suffered mild exposure after being left behind on a mountain.
You're a rabble, Bishop tells Liberals
JULIE Bishop says her party colleagues only have themselves to blame for more poor polling. - It is extraordinarily easy to get a report of a Liberal party person sounding as if they are dissing their own party, but Mrs Bishop never seems to get reported saying all the good things she says about the party. Even this article seems different in tone to the headline. - ed.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Newsweek: Fox 'Un-American?'
Now, un-American? First it was that Fox is not a news organization ... and now? Now Fox is un-american? Really, un-american??? (Tomorrow I fear I will be asked to register as a sex offender ... what in the world happened last week while I was traveling in North Korea? What unglued everyone?) Now Newsweek has an article attacking Fox [...]
===
Inside North Korea!
Greta returns from the People's Republic ...
And takes you behind the veil for a revealing look at life under Kim Jong-Il.
===
"Not Evil Just Wrong"
What "inconvenient truth" did this filmmaker's documentary uncover? Phelim McAleer with surprising answers!
===
Live from Guantanamo Bay!
As the White House makes plans to handle the 9/11 conspirators, the victims families ask, will they ever recieve justice?
===
What Would Washington Think?
What would the first president say about the direction Obama's taking the country today? Newt Gingrich is live from Mount Vernon!
=== Comments ===
Junk climate science a cover for fanatics
Piers Akerman
THE world has only five years to implement a destructive low-carbon economy or the planet will hit a “point of no return”, we were warned yesterday. But the report, by Climate Risk, for the World Wildlife Foundation, did not admit that even if we start destroying our economies, the nations of the world will continue to develop, the poor will become richer, and there’s every chance that the world will continue to cool as it has for the past 11 years.- I got a bit worried as to where this was heading with
the poor will become richeror
let alone why Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull permitted himself to become a distraction from the meaninglessness of the whole argument about Australia’s response to climate changePoor people will not profit from the AGW campaign. Some wealthy people will profit at the expense of others, including the poor.
Mr Turnbull is being tethered to his position in the hopes that he will self destruct between his constituents and the demands of his party. The ALP have no hope of winning his electorate, but they may be able to get a pliant independent in his electorate. Ironically, it was the cool handling of this issue by Mr Howard that allowed Mr Turnbull success the last election, but he is tethered by his leadership of the party now. Mr Turnbull needs to do what he is doing, and to allow the party to do what it does.
Note the ALP's role is to seek to have access to another tax. Clearly they are united in this. Their cynical exploitation for another pork barrel of the Australian public may bite them some day, but hasn't yet. I note that, politically, Truman survived dropping an atom bomb on a civilian population twice. The press can be forgiving of the worst of the political left. - ed
===
STOP THIS INCESSANT MEDIA SNIPING
Tim Blair
The Age‘s Anne Davies launches yet another attack on Barack Obama:Careful, Anne. You don’t want to get banned.
Is it possible for a world leader to be too rational, calm and deliberative?
===
ENTIRE FUTURE IN JEOPARDY, AS USUAL
Tim Blair
Canada’s Margaret Wente deals with an Antipodean interloper:
Tim Flannery, the well-known Australian environmentalist, was on CBC Radio the other day to issue more alarms about global warming. He was more pessimistic than ever. “It’s now or never,” he said. “We have about 20 years to address climate change or else our entire future is in jeopardy.”We’ve got 20 whole years? How come the World Wildlife Foundation is telling us we’ve got just five? And Gordon Brown says we have just 50 days? What we need around here is some kind of consensus.
He painted an apocalyptic picture of drought, flooding, famine and war.Yeah, he’ll do that. The war stuff is relatively recent, and is possibly brought on by pre-Copenhagen panic. But as Wente reports, for all of Flannery’s morbid predictions, people are returning to reason:
A poll of urban Canadians conducted by Ipsos Reid last month found global warming is far down the list of people’s concerns, somewhere below crime, health care, taxes, municipal spending, transportation and the economy. Not only that, but 41 per cent of respondents said the threat of global warming has been “overblown and exaggerated.”Similar results are noted in Australia and elsewhere. In fact, the trend is global:
An international survey of 11 nations, co-sponsored by environmental groups, found that fewer than half of those surveyed (47 per cent) were prepared to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions, down from 58 per cent before the crash. Most people said their governments should be doing more, but only 27 per cent wanted them to participate in Kyoto-style international agreements. Only one in five said they were willing to spend extra money to fight global warming.Concludes Wente:
Why are people cooling on warming? One reason is surely the apocalyptic language of Mr. Flannery and others.
When he talks about drought, he brings rain. When he talks about warming, he brings doubt. Speak on, Mr Flannery. Speak on.
===
SPECTACLE AVOIDED
Tim Blair
A change of approach from Balloon Boy’s parents:
David Lane, a Colorado civil rights and defense lawyer who is representing the father, Richard Heene, said both Mr. Heene and his wife, Mayumi, would plead not guilty and would turn themselves in to avoid further public spectacle.Can’t have that. Should they be convicted, the unusual couple may face a restitution bill of $2 million.
Mr. Lane contended that placing handcuffs on the Heenes, in the full glare of the news media and for their children to see, would be abusive to the youngsters.
===
THIS MEANS WAR
Tim Blair
Our heroic globey stockpiling efforts are put in the shade, so to speak, by champion German 3,000-globe hoarder Ulf Erdmann Ziegler:
His enormous stockpile is the fruit of a frenzied summer shopping spree. For weeks, he spent many of his waking hours on the phone and online tracking down vendors and snapping up enough incandescent bulbs to last him the rest of his life.Try that last line with a German accent. Awesome.
The buying binge was necessary, he said, to beat a ban by the European Union. As of Sept. 1, the manufacture and import of 100-watt incandescent bulbs have been outlawed within the EU, to be followed by their dimmer brethren in coming years. Once current stocks are gone, such bulbs will join Thomas Edison in the history books.
“It will run out,” Ziegler warned of the limited supply, “and everyone will be sorry.”
===
COMMENCE THE FINGER-SPINNING
Tim Blair
The ABC’s Virginia Trioli is busted mocking a conservative interviewee:
Observe the busting as it occurred, and read the response from Barnaby Joyce. READER CONTEST! Send pictures of yourself (or anyone) pulling a Trioli Crazy Face to this address. If enough are received, we’ll build a Virtual Virginia Crazy Quilt.
UPDATE. While Media Watch offered the host a possible escape ("was Virginia Trioli signalling ‘should we wrap that up and move on?’ … you decide"), Trioli herself took the honest approach:
Yes, it was off-air and an uncharacteristically frustrated moment from me, and the senator was very gracious in accepting my apology. Lesson learned.And Tony Wright reports:
Trioli’s unfortunate response had her on the phone begging Barnaby’s forgiveness, but he continued to fume. It wasn’t great timing – ABC chief Mark Scott was bunkered down in Parliament House being grilled by a Senate committee about public broadcasting.
===
HIGH GROUND TAKEN
Tim Blair
A special guest post from Currency Lad ...
Our ABC reports:
The head of the Australian Workers Union says the Government should put out a welcome mat for the Sri Lankan asylum seekers docked in west Java. So far the Labor movement (sic) has been broadly uncritical of the Prime Minister’s approach to the 255 asylum seekers intercepted by the Indonesian Navy.Well, there’s a huge surprise. The labour movement uncritical of the Labor prime minister! Ignoring the historical fact that the ALP has always been the traditional party of crass racism in Australia, Paul Howes, vice-president of the ACTU, declares:
“The 2001 election was a real dark blight on our nation’s history. I would expect rhetoric and crass racism to come from the Coalition.Then Mr Howes airbrushes history:
“But I expect that Labor should and must take the moral high ground on this matter because this is about social justice. This is about upholding the rule of law. This is about doing the right thing as a first world developed nation, and it’s about doing the right thing for our communities.”
“There was much community resentment and opposition to Vietnamese refugees being brought into our country,” he said.Sure, now that Gough “F------ Vietnamese Balts” Whitlam and Bob “Not Your Uncle” Hawke are no longer in Federal Parliament.
“But now several decades later, no one could dispute the fact that it has been a positive thing for our nation, a positive thing for those individuals.
“The Vietnamese boat people of the 70s have made a lasting, incredibly valuable contribution to the development of our nation.
“I don’t think anyone in Federal Parliament would dispute that.”
===
SOMETHING’S WRONG
Tim Blair
The Wall Street Journal, last week:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched a brash price war against Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday, saying it would sell 10 hotly anticipated new books for just $10 apiece through its online site, Walmart.com.Further from AP. As part of this price war, Palin’s hotly anticipated new book is indeed discounted to $9 – something that Charles Johnson, who has evidently abandoned his previous research skills along with his positions on just about everything, believes is a sign of massive Palin decline:
That was just the beginning.
Hours later, Amazon matched the $10 price, squaring off in a battle for low-price and e-commerce leadership heading into the crucial holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart soon fired back with a promise to drop its prices to $9 by Friday morning – and made good on that vow by early evening Thursday.
Wal-Mart said the splashy move to discount pre-orders of popular books such as Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” and Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” was part of a larger strategy to establish Walmart.com as the biggest and cheapest online retailer.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Palin’s book is now for pre-sale at Amazon at a 69% discount?So thrilled was Johnson that he mentioned the discount three times during just one post and its subsequent comments, including this:
Wow.By the same standard, then, something’s also very wrong in John Grisham-ville, Dan Brown-ville, Kathryn Stockett-ville and Stephen King-ville (incidentally, Palin’s book had already hit #1 at Amazon some time prior to the current discount war). More obviously, something is very wrong in Johnson-ville. As his own leftoid stalkers observe: “A conversation between today’s Charles Johnson and his 2003 self would be something to behold … Charles is becoming one of us now!”
69% off on a book that was hyped as one of the year’s hottest sellers.
Something’s very wrong in Palin-ville.
===
IF THE NOBEL COMMITTEE WERE BLACK, THIS WOULD BE RACIST
Tim Blair
Last words on the Nobel peace prize from Noemie Emery:
The jig is up. For decades, the peace prize committee has seemed to speak with the voice of humanity, or of the world community, or of the Almighty, but it is clear now that it speaks with the voice of five more or less insular nitwits, of great self-regard and no great distinction, too clueless and tone-deaf to sense how their choice would be seen.And P.J. O’Rourke:
The peace prize committee members have achieved what Buddhists call satori. Enlightenment came to them through contemplation of an ancient Zen koan, “What is the sound of one American president doing *$@#-all?” The answer is “ka-ching” — a $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize.The question is, who will win it next year? On recent form, it’s a choice between someone who’s done something bad or someone who hasn’t done anything at all.
The five members of the prize selection committee (chosen by the Norwegian Parliament, apparently at random from the local methadone clinic) will now travel the world offering all of humanity release from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Or did the 1989 peace prize winner, the Dalai Lama, do that already?
===
How many more people do we want?
Andrew Bolt
Former Liberal immigration minister Kevin Andrews asks the question earlier posed by former Labor minister Barry Cohen and me:
How many people do we need?…Full speech below:
In 2007-08, 173,290 people permanently migrated to Australia. In addition, there were another 544,000 temporary migrants to the country, excluding the five million of visitors. That’s close to three-quarters of a million extra people residing here in a year....
Our roads are congested, our public transport overcrowded, our water supply inadequate, and our amenity under threat… Australia is facing an unprecedented shortage of housing.. Lot sizes have been shrinking…
According to Demographer, Graeme Hugo, population growth has accounted for around three quarters of household growth in Australia since 1961. Immigration has accounted for almost 60 per cent of Melbourne’s population growth over the past decade....
Why more and more people? Before addressing this question, let me state clearly that I am not opposed to immigration… My complaint is that there is no rational policy operating at the moment.
===
Germany warns us not to repeat its green disaster
Andrew Bolt
You’ve no doubt heard the Greens demand we copy Germany and invest in “green” energy to create jobs. Here’s Greens deputy leader Christine Milne, for example:
Also, the energy revolution in Germany and Japan to see that moving out of old electricity generation and moving into solar and renewables creates jobs and huge amounts of investment and attracts innovators to the economy and that’s what we desperately need to do in Australia.Other green activists - The Age, for instance - have been just as foolish in demanding we copy Germany’s “green jobs” strategy. Tragically, that call is now being heeded by the Rudd Government.
But the “green jobs” strategy has been a complete disaster everywhere - and that includes Germany, according to a new report by the German think tank Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung:
Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred.Those costs of each green job can be astonishing - mad, even:
In the end, Germany’s PV [solar energy] promotion has become a subsidization regime that, on a per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per-worker subsidies as high as 175,000 € (US $ 240,000).The Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung says government investment in green jobs actually stifles innovation, and it concludes:
Although Germany’s promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a “shining example in providing a harvest for the world” (The Guardian 2007), we would instead regard the country’s experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits.Of course, Germany’s Die Zeit warned us earlier this year that the “green energy” revolution the Greens recommended would burn us as badly as it had burned Germany:
Although Germany is not situated in the sunny part of the world, no country has more solar panels. The boom, however, is artificial. And it costs consumers an absolute fortune.A study this year by Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos also tried to warn against the ruinous plans of the Greens, given the devastating results of Spain’s own heavy investment in “green power”:
The sum can be spelled out quite precisely: the expected installation of new solar panels in 2009 alone will cost German consumers ten billion euros in the next 20 years. This will produce about 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of solar electricity each year, which corresponds to about 0.3 percent of Germany’s current electricity consumption. That’s near to nothing.
But the ten billion euros are just the cost for the new systems. The panels built up to 2008 will burden consumers with an additional cost of 30 billion euros.... If the forecast of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association were to materialize, there will be so many solar panels installed in Germany by 2013 that the cost will grow to more than 77 billion euros - adjusted for inflation.
The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 ($1.03 million) to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than €1 million ($1.8 million) per wind industry job… The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created....UPDATE
Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics (solar), 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro… These costs do not appear to be unique to Spain’s approach but instead are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources…
The high cost of electricity due to the green job policy tends to drive the relatively most energy-intensive companies and industries away, seeking areas where costs are lower.
As for Denmark:
Based on the total subsidies to the Danish wind industry, the average subsidy for the 28,000 workers employed in this sector equals US$9,000 to US$14,000 per year per job. However, this average subsidy does not reflect the actual cost of the additional job creation. In most cases, creating a job in the wind sector has only moved that job from another sector and not resulted in any additional job creation. A very optimistic ball park estimate of real net jobs created is around 10% of the total wind power work force, or 2,800 jobs. In this case, the actual subsidy for each additional job created is US$90,000 to US$140,000.
===
Tim Flannery: agent of sabotage
Andrew Bolt
Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery is blamed for now spreading global warming denialism.
===
Rudd lets in more emitters - and more pain
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann explains the growing insanity of the Rudd Government’s promise to make us slash our emissions to “save” the world:
AUSTRALIA’S booming population will make the government’s attack on carbon-based energy far more punishing for the average Australian and even more destructive of the wider economy.I haven’t seen - especially from either Wong and her fellow ministers or their ‘expert’ advisers - any ‘oh damn’ sort of realisation of the more punitive disaster they are hell-bent on embracing.
All the assumptions of both the Garnaut Report on emission reduction alternatives and the Treasury modelling of their purported impact on the economy ... (assumed) our population was headed for 28.5 million mid-century; now we officially think it’s headed for 35 million. With self-evidently a bigger number at the 2020 first target mark....
Ross Garnaut, the government’s climate adviser, proposed three alternative targets for the cut to carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. By 5 per cent ‘unconditionally’ - that’s to say, if we were left sitting pretty much on our own like a very stupid shag on a rock. By 10 per cent if we got a deal at Copenhagen; by 25 per cent if we all wanted to get ‘aggro’ on the cuts…
Because of our surging population, the ‘pathetic’ 5 per cent cut equated, Garnaut noted, to 25 per cent in per capita terms. That’s really a huge cut, purported to be achieved in just 10 years. While the 10 per cent cut was 30 per cent per capita and the 25 per cent cut was 40 per cent per capita.
You can see the big damage is done with even just a small overall cut. In any event, that was ‘then’, when we expected ‘fewer people’.
Now, and these are my calculations: the 5 per cent cut would be equal to 27-29 per cent per capita by 2020, on the government’s new intergenerational calculations, unveiled by Treasurer Wayne Swan last month. The 10 per cent to 31-32 per cent; and the 25 per cent overall cut equal to 43 per cent per capita.
===
Offering excuses even Trioli couldn’t accept
Andrew Bolt
Yes, the ABC’s Media Watch did run this footage of ABC2 breakfast host Virginia Trioli mocking a conservative politican as crazy, but talk about flogging the Left - and a colleague - with a feather:
Now what was that? Was Virginia Trioli signalling, ”Should we wrap that up and move on?”Trioli herself has given the answer:
Or was she signalling, “I told you he was totally off his rocker!”
Yes, it was off-air and an uncharacteristically frustrated moment from me, and the senator was very gracious in accepting my apology.UPDATE
Tony Wright defines “accepting my apology” more precisely:
Ms Trioli’s unfortunate caught-on-camera response had her on the phone begging Barnaby’s forgiveness, but he remained fuming.UPDATE 2
A conservative Senator suggests this better illustration of the issue we’ve fingered:
UPDATE 3
Barnaby Joyce fires back beautifully:
If you think I’m crazy, have a look at the ETSA lovely excerpt:
As far as the climate goes, the tax is pointless. It reminds me of the story where the Roman Emperor Caligula marched his legions to the coast of France, where he told them to pick up seashells and then he marched them back to Rome.UPDATE 4
When people asked why he did that it was assumed the only reason was that he was barking mad. Every now and then, the rulers of a nation do things like that.
Apparently, the only reason we are going down this manic path is that we are going to be world leaders.
Some apology:
But Despatch Box can reveal Trioli also hilariously dished up some free media advice to the Nationals Senate leader in the process of her apology, explaining he’s not nuts after all, just talking nonsense.I doubt Trioli is the best judge of that. But the bottom line is that Trioli is apologising for her rudeness, rather than bias - or even ignorance.
===
You may now use might better
Andrew Bolt
Oliver Kamm may finally have ended my 50 years of confusion over two words - a confusion which might well have plagued me for 50 more:
I have for years kept an excellent example of the correct use of may and might within a single sentence. It comes from a review in The Observer of the second volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. The reviewer, Peter Conrad, writes (emphasis added): “[Hitler] made up military strategy as he went along and may have lost the war because of muddled tactics: if the Germans had reacted more swiftly on the Normandy beaches, Kershaw reckons, they might have beaten back the Allied invasion.”Read on for the explanation, and avoid my embarrassment.
===
Our charity isn’t free
Andrew Bolt
If we’re saving their lives, that’s most of the argument right there. No question. But let’s not pretend there’s no cost in bringing in people who are often from very different cultures and educational standards:
Refugees are creating a soaring welfare headache for taxpayers with the total annual cost of Centrelink benefits up nearly 40 per cent to an estimated $628 million in just two years.Yes, there are these claims:
Figures obtained from Centrelink following a Freedom of Information request show there were 52,469 refugees on the various categories of refugee visas in reciept of the aged pension, Disability Support Pension, Austudy, Newstart or the Youth Allowance as at June 30, 2009.
Refugee Council of Australia chief executive Paul Power said ...studies had shown that refugees tend to have repaid all their costs within 17 years...But two points: first, are we comparing like with like, when judging former refugees with ones drawn from today’s refugee camps? Second, would refugees selected from more culturally compatible areas repay those costs much faster? Don’t forget that communities that struggle to fnd work here also come with costs not factored into such studies - as we see with the much higher crime rates among people drawn from Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon.
UPDATE
The hypocrisy is astonishing. What Kevin Rudd promised two years ago:
The Pacific Solution is just wrong. It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. It’s not the right way to in fact handle asylum seekers or others and therefore we think the best way ahead is to use Christmas Island instead. It’s a facility which is part of the Commonwealth of Australia....There will be no continuation of the Pacific Solution under a Federal Labor government.What the Rudd Government still jeered as of yesterday:
On the resumption of parliament yesterday, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith challenged the Coalition to nominate which of Labor’s policy changes it would overturn… ”Would you reintroduce the Pacific solution, where processing is done on Manus Island and Nauru?What Rudd now copies from John Howard, substituting only “Indonesia” for “Nauru”:
SEVENTY-EIGHT asylum seekers who were picked up by an Australian customs ship at the weekend are likely to end up in detention in Indonesia after a diplomatic impasse over their fate was broken late yesterday.It’s the hypocrisy and spin which is most revolting.
===
So-called terrorists and so-called useful idiots
Andrew Bolt
Gerard Henderson on the excuse-makers:
Last week the ABC 702 radio presenter Deborah Cameron referred to the ”so-called terror trial in Parramatta”. On Friday, after deliberating for over a month, a jury at the Supreme Court returned guilty verdicts against five men on terrorism charges. The jurors were unaware that four other men, charged following the same police investigation, had already pleaded guilty and had been sentenced.Henderson goes on to name Phillip Adams and some person of even less consequence.
Clearly the jury was convinced, beyond reasonable doubt, that the five men acted in the preparation of a terrorist act. Certainly the evidence, albeit circumstantial, was overwhelming. There were numerous intercepted conversations and telephone buggings and some of the men had collected large quantities of weapons and ammunition, along with chemicals that could be used in constructing explosive devices.
What was a “so-called terror trial” to an ABC presenter in Ultimo was the real thing to the men and women of the jury in Parramatta.
In her initial report of the jury’s decision on The World Today on Friday, Philippa McDonald, even after the guilty findings, was still referring to what had been “alleged” against the men. She editorialised the case was “hugely circumstantial” and maintained it “had to be said that, for a lot of the Crown case, the defence came back with something else”.
There is considerable evidence that members of what is best termed the civil liberties lobby - including some journalists, lawyers and academics - do not want to accept that a few men in Western societies want to engage in violent jihad.
===
But the spin demands a crisis - and this spending
Andrew Bolt
Once again Rudd’s spin is colliding with reality. Michael Stutchbury:
This $88bn budget stimulus may have been fair enough at the time. But the economy is now performing much better than forecast, the Treasury reckons Australia’s recession would have been modest even with no budget stimulus, we’ve become the first Group of 20 economy to raise official interest rates and the dollar is headed towards greenback parity…And a question. Rudd and Treasury did not predict the financial crisis, and did not predict the rapid recovery. How much do they really understand what’s going on?
The elders of Australia’s modern economic success are warning that the Rudd government is in danger of fighting a global financial crisis that is fast receding rather than dealing with the China boom challenges ahead.
UPDATE
PETER COSTELLO, the nation’s longest-serving treasurer, exited politics yesterday declaring the Rudd Government did not need to stimulate the economy to shield it against the global economic crisis.He said the Reserve Bank’s interest rate cuts, combined with the automatic stabilisers - increased welfare payments as tax receipts decreased - would have been sufficient to keep recession at bay.
===
On being inspired by a mass-murdering dictator
Andrew Bolt
Historian Victor Davis Hanson:
I am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a ‘political philosopher’ is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto. Mao killed anywhere from 50 million to 70 million innocents in the initial cleansing of Nationalists, the scouring of the countryside, the failed Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Tibet, and the internal Chinese gulag. Dunn’s praise of a genocidal monster was no inadvertent slip: She was reading from a written text and went into great detail to give the full context of the remark. . . . So where do all these people, so intimate with our president (Dunn is the wife of his personal lawyer), come from? A right-wing attack machine could not make up such statements as those tossed off by a Dunn or a Van Jones.Let’s rerun the footage:
UPDATE
Daniel Mandel asks why Barack Obama is subverting democracy in Honduras, backing a sacked Leftist President who tried to subvert the Honduran constitution to stay in office?
===
Let her first govern her own staff
Andrew Bolt
Why are some people in the compassion industry so very hard to get on with?
The Federal Government revealed yesterday that since Ms Bryce was sworn in as the country’s 25th Governor-General in September last year, about 30 staff had left Government House.
That’s more than one third of the 85 Canberra staff - a hefty turnover in only 13 months.
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