Headlines Monday 2nd November 2009

Obama made a lot of promises during his two-year campaign for change — with the one-year mark since his election coming up, now's a good time to take a look at how his actions have measured up.

Obama in All-Out Push to Save New Jersey's Corzine
President makes a last-minute appearance for governor in race that may foreshadow next year's elections

White House Says Muddled Runoff Will Not Deter Afghan Strategy
White House claims presidential challenger's withdrawal won't complicate Obama's evolving war plan

Palestinians: Clinton Undermines Talks
Secretary of state calls for resumption of peace negotiations despite Israel's West Bank settlements


Call it dedication or just sheer madness but a punter has dodged bullets and bombs, driving from Zurich to be at Melbourne Cup

Big banks promise years of greed
It could be two years before banks begin to give back stolen interest rate cuts worth $8bn.

'Balibo Five pleaded for their lives'
A WITNESS has come forward saying he saw the Balibo Five killed by soldiers as the newsmen begged for their lives.

Payout for libido loss over dead mum
A MAN who suffered shock and loss of libido after his mother died in a nursing home has won more than $30,000 in damages.

Cops use Twitter to track crims
POLICE are using social networking sites to directly contact wanted people as well as posting crims photographs online.

Jared Kinnear wasn't wearing a seat-belt

THIS is the first photo of car crash victim Jared Kinnear who died instantly this morning when the car he was a passenger in hit a pole.

Economist 'gagged' over ETS attack
AN environmental economist has accused the CSIRO of trying to gag his report attacking the Rudd Government's ETS policies.

Voters welcome first election in 24 years
VOTER registration for Sudan's first presidential and legislative elections in nearly a quarter of a century has kicked off.
=== Comments ===
ECO V8
Tim Blair
Everything associated with greenism always turns out to be more expensive than first estimated. In other green news, faith in government delivers an unintended outcome:

Large cars with powerful six-cylinder and V8 engines have embarrassed the organisers of a fuel economy challenge by taking out the top three spots.

The Eco Challenge, which finished in Adelaide yesterday, was won by a Holden performance ute with a 6.2-litre V8 engine, which finished ahead of 10 smaller cars with tiny four-cylinder engines …

The organisers had designed the event to show off the environmental impact of small cars … [but] small cars were pushed down the rankings because the winner was the car that could most improve on its official fuel consumption.

Says Eco Challenge event director Chris Selwood:
“We will be looking at the parameters for a future competition.”
===
NO BALL
Tim Blair
Behold the evil influence wrought by Muttiah Muralitharan upon world cricket.
===
FROM MANNE TO MANSON
Tim Blair
Local intellectual Robert Manne recently claimed that people who doubted global warming – so-called “global warming sceptics” – weren’t sceptical at all. Scepticism is a good thing, Manne pointed out, so he suggested a different term.

“Denialism, a concept that was first widely used, as far as I know, for those who claimed that the Holocaust was a fraud, is the concept I believe we should use,” Manne instructed.

This seems a rather clumsy and emotional shame-by-illogic tactic from someone who claims to base his arguments on science and reason. Disagree with Manne about future weather patterns? Well, that means you’re an apologist for the Third Reich, or as bad as one.
===
SHOCK POLL RESULTS
Tim Blair
Nerds have less sex than normal people. And nobody likes the Rees government.
===
PALIN PREVAILIN’
Tim Blair
The three-way (lately reduced to two-way) battle for a New York congressional seat reveals the power of a certain private citizen and her Facebook site:
Sarah Palin, using her unique sense of timing, one week ago became the biggest name of in-prime party leaders to endorse Hoffman. Had she stayed on the sidelines, this contest could have played out in predictable fashion: Republicans stayed split and Democrat Bill Owens would have cruised to victory.

Instead, by all appearances, the conservative revolt has succeeded. Even the national GOP – which had endorsed Scozzafava and was slamming outsider Hoffman as much as Democrat Owens – is now recognizing that district voters seem to flocking to Hoffman.

Outside observers who want to dismiss Palin do so at their peril.
===
INCONVENIENT CHILL
Tim Blair
Cold, cold, cold in Sydney last month; not quite June 2007 cold, but still cold enough to keep warmenists at their current level of twitchy, polystyrene-scraping panic. And just in time for the big Hopenchangen conference, too.
===
JEEPERS
Tim Blair
A carjacking is foiled:

The driver was forced to stop her car while three women allegedly surrounded the vehicle, opened the doors and tried to grab the keys.

Sgt Lambert said the driver was dragged out of the car by her hair.

He said the three women allegedly got into the car, but only managed to drive 150m because the driver could not drive a manual.

In other motoring news, here’s the first attempted honour killing involving a Jeep Grand Cherokee:

Noor Almaleki, 20, who was run over by her father in a parking lot at 89th and Peoria avenues Oct. 20, is still in the hospital in very critical condition, police spokesperson Jay Davies said.

Family and friends told police that Faleh Hassan Amaleki, 48, a resident of Glendale, had become upset with his daughter because she had become too ‘westernized’ and described the hit-and-run as an attempted honor killing.

Jeeps are evidently a cultural preference. But in New York, a woman rebels against her westernisation:

Die, infidel!

A devout Muslim woman, furious at her new husband for trying to make her drink booze, eat pork and wear revealing clothes, allegedly tried to slaughter him in his sleep.

Staten Island prosecutors said Rabia Sarwar, 37, slashed the neck of hubby Sheikh Naseem at 3 a.m. Wednesday while screaming, “It’s time for you to die!”

It wasn’t; Naseem survived with minor injuries. Sarwar also disapproved of Naseem’s reading habits:
His favorite book was Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” – the book that led the Ayatollah Khomeini to put out a contract for the author’s murder.
===
A lovely reason to quit
Andrew Bolt

Rather cool:

I now know who I am. I’m a teacher.
===
So sceptics must be child-slaughterers
Andrew Bolt
Utterly shameless:

Climate change could kill 250,000 children next year, and the figure could rise to more than 400,000 by 2030, according to Save the Children.

Just see all that child-killing global warming lately:

How dare they.

UPDATE

But why is it that we’re not just deceived about the costs of global warming, but about the costs of green “fixes” as well?

State officials deliberately underestimated the cost of Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s plan to lure green energy companies to Oregon with big taxpayer subsidies, resulting in a program that cost 40 times more than unsuspecting lawmakers were told, an investigation by The Oregonian shows.

UPDATE 2

Robert Doyle is s man I like, but I have to point out his hypocrisy - which isn’t the one identified in this report:

ROBERT Doyle pledged to ban junkets, but will spend $61,000 of ratepayers’ cash to attend a climate change forum.

Cr Doyle will join Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and three other City of Melbourne representatives next month to “advocate for cities” at the global forum on carbon trading and other environment issues.

Robert, how dare you lend your imprimatur to warming claims you know are dodgy? And how can you and your colleagues possibly take a junket flight to a conference that’s actually about cutting gases? Please!
===
Did Rudd’s compassion kill them?
Andrew Bolt
Yet more boat people drown - and it’s time to hold the Rudd Government to account:

A BOAT carrying 40 asylum-seekers that sank 350 nautical miles north-west of the Cocos Island capsized in darkness overnight as a commercial vessel attempted to rescue them.

The RAAF and Australia’s Royal Flying Doctors Service will today join the search for survivors, with grave fears now held for more than 20 people unaccounted for after 17 were rescued.

I’m bloody angry. I warned again and again and again that people were once more dying at sea following Kevin Rudd’s relaxation of our boat people laws, and would continue to do so while those laws were relaxed.

The response? A wilful refusal to look at the brutal consequences of this display of “compassion”. In fact, when I warned last month that at least 25 boat people had died already this year trying to get here, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed “there is no evidence to support this figure”.

I recounted and found that in fact at least 42 boat people had died. With these latest suspected drownings, the toll is now 61 dead at least.

61 dead. That’s the price to pay to allow politicians and activists to seem compassionate, by weakening the laws that had deterred boat people from risking their lives like this. Rudd weakened the laws again at the end of last July, and the signal was immediately heard, and my red dot marks the spot on the Immigration Department graph:

Is that the only one of Rudd’s signals the boat people heard? This boat sent out a rescue signal on reaching Australian search-and-rescue territory, and although it reportedly had a hole in the hull it only capsized - it’s reported, at least - during an unspecified interaction with a trawler and natural gas tanker attempting to help. We know that the Tamils on the Oceanic Viking had also issued an SOS, although their own vessel seemed to have only holes in the hull apparently drilled by the boat people themselves.

But how obsessed this political-media class is by seeming, rather than being. By flaunting their intentions, rather than take responsibility for the consequences of their dreams. Children are now in charge.

Kevin Rudd, do you accept responsibility for luring people to their deaths?

Julia Gillard, do you see these dead now?

You advocates for a more “humane” policy, do you see now the consequences? Did you ever consider that some may die so that you may feel noble?

But the answer so far from the Rudd Government? To refuse so far to even confirm if those who drowned were asylum seekers.
===
Dear protester: more of that acting locally, please
Andrew Bolt
Why is it that passionate greens often have the slobbiest houses in the street? Or, as Gavin Atkins shows, the messiest camps in the forest…
===
Rudd’s revolution crushed
Andrew Bolt
I’ve praised Julia Gillard’s promises to make schools more accountable, but promises are just words - and all those new school halls Gillard built instead can’t teach.

So this is no surprise:

THE education revolution announced by Kevin Rudd almost two years ago is drifting off course, having failed to adopt key strategies critical to improving schools, including giving principals greater autonomy, improving teacher education and introducing different models for running schools as in the US and Britain.

International education consultant and former dean of education at Melbourne University Brian Caldwell yesterday said the education revolution was heading for failure and risked giving Australia one of the most centralised and bureaucratically run systems in the world.

Professor Caldwell assessed the Rudd government’s education policies against 10 strategies considered critical for improving education systems, marking the education revolution 43 out of 100…

Specifically, he criticised the failure to prevent the publication of league tables ranking schools based on their students’ test results.
===
Sydney is warm in theory, though
Andrew Bolt
Still waiting for that warming:

SYDNEYSIDERS are repacking their winter woollies after the coldest October in 17 years.

UPDATE

Didn’t Al Gore warn that warming was making huricanes and cyclones worse? Instead:

Global and Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity remains near 30-year historical lows

But think Gore can give up this iconic scare of his, even when the facts so clearly contradict him? Check the cover of his new book:

UPDATE 2

Good weather for ducks and denialists in New Zealand, too:

New Zealand has coldest October in over 25 years

Polar bears may find a new home in Beijing:

this is the first time that Beijing is swept by cold snap in October since the 1970s

Skiers around the world are even happier:

With Kitzbuhel’s earliest ever opening in Austria over the weekend, following the Planai above Schladming the week before that, as well as seven glaciers areas to choose from, Austria continues to offer the biggest choice of skiing in the Alps. The heavy snowfall there last week has set up some great conditions.. The Pyrenees received some of the best snow in decades at many resorts last winter, and it all began in autumn last year, so the region is hoping for a repeat of winter 08-09.... In Western Canada the Canada Olympic Park near Calgary in Alberta is already open and resorts across Alberta and British Columbia have been reporting heavy snowfalls ahead of planned opening dates in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, down in Denver:

The average October temperature through yesterday was 43.3 degrees. That puts it in a tie for the second coldest October in Denver on record.

And up in Michigan:

it’s the coldest October in northern Michigan since 1952

Farmers in Illinois now wish for warming:

A combination of the coldest summer since record-keeping began in 1900, as well as a number of months of record rainfalls have kept farmers out of the fields.

UPDATE 3

We may be in for chillier times very soon, on the evidence of the oxygen isotopes:

UPDATE 4

Odd that our country towns aren’t warming, but the concrete cities are.

UPDATE 5

Didn’t Tim Flannery warn that Sydney could run out of water by 2007? Check the month of rain that’s forecast, with storages already 57 per cent full.
===
No more Mr nice guy
Andrew Bolt
Glen Milne agrees this is Kevin Rudd’s Tampa moment - but also the moment when he must finally make a decision which angers:

Just how diabolical the situation has become is made clear by the fact that even Rudd’s sternest critics from within the Labor movement now admit it is politically impossible for the government to admit the Sri Lankans on board into Australia for processing. To do so would be to send not only a green light but a chequered flag to the people smugglers…

So politically Rudd finds himself in the worst of all worlds. His failure to seal any deal at the Indonesian end of the Indonesian Solution means his claim to being “humane” when it comes to border protection is shot. And when it comes to the Oceanic Viking his simultaneous claim to being “tough” sees him hoist on his own rhetorical petard. Being tough now must inevitably take the form of some form of forced disembarkation, reinforcing the pitiless inhumanity of the situation.

The fact is that when it comes to people smuggling you cannot be both tough and humane. They are largely mutually exclusive positions. Howard chose to be tough. Rudd just looks confused. It may yet mark the beginning of the end of the characteristic that has so far underpinned his stratospheric poll ratings: his ability to be all things to all people.

UPDATE

It’s children overboard:

Some of the 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers onboard Australian Customs ship the Oceanic Viking have threatened to kill themselves rather than go to Indonesia… They say conditions onboard the ship are tough, especially for a nine-month-old baby who is not getting enough milk.... A nine-month-old baby on board is apparently crying constantly because of a shortage of milk.

It’s history repeating itself, with Rudd now playing the part of John Howard - but without a compass.

UPDATE 2

Pray it’s not another Siev X:

A BOAT carrying about 40 people has sunk off the Cocos Islands, west of Australia. A spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Rescue Coordination Centre responded to a distress signal late on Sunday night (AEDT) from a ship 350 nautical miles north-west of the Cocos Islands… It is not yet known if the boat was carrying asylum-seekers.

I’ve warned many times that Rudd’s more “humane” policies may be luring dozens more people to their deaths.

UPDATE 3

Deaths, I’m afraid:

A boat carrying around 40 people has sunk off the remote Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, with possibly only 15 people rescued, Australian officials and local media said Monday.

UPDATE 4

Paul Sheehan lists 10 reasons to conclude we’re not bastards with boat people, and that ferrying the Tamils refusing to leave the Oceanic Viking back to Sri Lanka is a good idea.

UPDATE 5

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer says Kevin Rudd is just painfully relearning all the lessons the Howard Government could have told him for free, and confesses:

I admit it. As Mr Rudd flails around trying to craft a new boat-people policy I have a sense of schadenfreude.

Nauru, he points out, was a much nicer place for boat people than Rudd’s Indonesian alternative.
===
How the Greens deceive on boat people
Andrew Bolt

David Burchell provides the theory:

...the problem for the Greens is that, in parading their consciences and seeking political advantage at once, they are led to become frankly dishonest. It is simply not possible for Australia to responsibly settle every person who may want to come here by boat. And if that is not possible, we presumably have a duty to enforce processes enabling us to give priority to the claims of some over others. Unless you can articulate some other policy that could achieve the same end, you are dealing not in the currency of conscience, but of moral humbug.

I’ll now provide the example - Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. I’ve already noted this claim of hers about the 78 Tamils on board the Oceanic Viking:

The point is these people are desperate. If you listen to the stories of the conditions in the camps in Sri Lanka, where people are fearful even to say that they want to leave, the stories of people being persecuted and executed simply because they say, “We don’t want to be here anymore”; “I want some future for my family.”:

Untruth one: there is in fact no credible evidence that Tamils in those camps are being executed.

Untruth two: there is in fact evidence that the Tamils on the Oceanic Viking were fleeing not Sri Lanka but Indonesia, where they’ve lived for years.

Was Hanson-Young embarrassed to have been caught telling things that were not true? Hell, no - being “compassionate” means never have to say sorry for saying any old thing, no matter how improbable or impractical. Here she now is on Insiders yesterday:

Well look I fear that in the end that these people may be forcibly removed from the boat, put back in detention in Indonesia ...

Untruth three: ”back in detention”? The Tamils weren’t in detention but living in rented accommodation.

And, but what I would like to see is that we actually take the heat out of this debate...

Untruth four: or a moral evasion. In fact, its Hanson-Young who has injected heat in this debate with talk of executions.

We’re only talking about 78 people.

Untruth five: almost no one is talking about just 78 people. If that were truth, we’d almost all agree to let these few in. No, we’re talking about the many, many thousands of boat people who’d see this as a signal.

If the Prime Minister had brought this boat home originally, had these people processed, seen whether they actually are refugees - if they are they can stay, if they’re not they can go home - we wouldn’t be having this crisis and the hysteria would not be circling.

Untruth six: if Rudd brought the Tamils here, after rescuing them in Indonesian waters while responding to a phoney SOS, people smugglers would get the message and this “crisis” would be repeated again and again.

We’ve seen the Opposition try and gain mileage from this.

More a fudge than an untruth. Aren’t the Greens - and Hanson-Young herself - trying to gain mileage from this?

We need to be doing a lot more in our region to encourage Indonesia, Malaysia and others to sign the refugee convention.

Untruth seven: this is peddling a solution that Hanson-Young should know is pure snake-oil. Indonesia can never be convinced to sign a refugee convention that will oblige it to give haven to the thousands of boat people using it as a transit point to Australia, or the thousands more that could motor over from Malaysia or southern Thailand and claim persecution.

Australia has to look at our humanitarian intake. We have a lower percentage of our overall immigration intake than we did under the Howard government, than we did under the Keating government. It’s half as much as the Keating government gave.

Another fudge, to imply a much bigger cut in numbers than we’ve actually seen. The humanitarian intake under Keating reached 15,000. Today it’s 13,507.

You know the easiest way to get to Australia is by flying. Most of the people who seek asylum come by plane, 96 per cent of them. Five-thousand, we had 5,000 last year alone that came via plane and sought asylum. That’s the easy option.

Untruth eight: If that’s the “easy option”, why do people come by boat instead? As for the figures, nearly 2000 boat people have arrived so far this year. If they really represented just four per cent of all asylum seekers, we’d have not 5000 asylum seekers coming by plane but more than 40,000.
===
Keating blasts Rudd’s poisoning of debate
Andrew Bolt
I warned that Kevin Rudd was nobbling a potential critic in Peter Costello by appointing him to the Future Fund board of guardians. Paul Keating says it’s actually the other way around:

PAUL Keating has launched a furious attack on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, accusing him of disloyalty to Labor in appointing Peter Costello, a ‘’policy bum’’, to the Future Fund’s board of guardians.

The former prime minister said Mr Rudd ... was poisoning the honesty of the partisan policy debate.

He also accused Mr Rudd of compromising Treasurer Wayne Swan and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, who announced the Costello appointment, because they effectively would be unable to attack the former government’s record. The extraordinary vehement Keating attack reflects, in stronger form, what many in Labor think about Mr Rudd choosing former Coalition politicians, who include Tim Fischer, Brendan Nelson, Bruce Baird and Robert Hill, for government jobs.

Either way, or both, this appointment demonstrates not just Rudd’s attempts to sign up his critics (most starkly illustrated by the farcical ”ideas summit”), but the dangers this represents to the healthy debates we must have.

UPDATE

Debate? What debate?

THE nation’s peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government’s climate change policies. The paper, by the CSIRO’s Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed.

This news astonishes Sinclair Davidson, who swears Labor was once dead against this kind of thing. Look, he’s even got the quotes.
===
The warming boogyman will get you
Andrew Bolt

Brendan O’Neill on the sinister campaign by the British Government - and green extremists - to terrify children into believing we’re warming the world:

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change. The children were most likely to be kept awake thinking about “the possible submergence of entire countries” and the “welfare of animals"…

Worryingly, the survey also found that one in seven children blamed their own parents for the coming climate doom… Indeed, environmentalist activists now cynically exploit children’s fears to try to get them to snitch on their parents. A book called How To Turn Your Parents Green, by James Russell, encourages children to “nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking our world”, that is, grown-ups, or “Groans"…

Traditionally, it has only been the most authoritarian regimes on Earth - think Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union - that encouraged children to spy on and squeal on their parents. Now environmentalists do it, too, though with a Little Green Book rather than a little red one.

When I was a child in the 1980s, the spectre of nuclear war was used to keep children in a permanent state of panic; today climate change plays that role. We should be wary indeed of any campaign that makes children feel scared and guilty and even drives them mad, and which turns them against their own parents.
===
Losing legitmacy - and Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
Iraq, the “bad” war, was always likely to be easier to win that Afghanistan, the “good” war which is now going south fast:

Afghanistan was plunged into further uncertainty yesterday after opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of this week’s runoff presidential election. Dr Abdullah pulled out of Saturday’s poll after President Hamid Karzai refused to sack the head of the Independent Election Commission, held responsible by the challenger’s camp for the massive fraud in the August 20 first round…

While Dr Abdullah has pulled out of a poll he was not expected to win, his decision leaves the electoral process in disarray and thwarts Western attempts to salvage some legitimacy for the Karzai government.

Afghanistan’s government is not the only political body losing legitimacy:

Despite the presence of about 70,000 troops under NATO command, the central Asian country has become increasingly violent and unstable. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force has been looking for more troops in order to reverse course. But NATO nations have so far come up short on offering troops, and now their alliance’s reputation is on the line…

Rick Hillier, a retired Canadian general and former chief of defense staff in Ottawa, ... provides a written attack on the alliance’s performance in Afghanistan from his time as commander of ISAF.

The mission’s leadership is “abysmal,” he writes. Staff at NATO’s headquarters in Kabul “had no strategy, no clear articulation of what they wanted to achieve, no political guidance and few forces.” Afghanistan has shown that the alliance has become “a corpse, decomposing,” Hillier concludes. “Unless the alliance can snatch victory out of feeble efforts, it’s not going to be long in existence in its present form.”

And there’s Barack Obama’s reputation and power, too. David Brooks says faith in him is also waning among military men::

I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan…

They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level. They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental....

These people… have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad....

They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.... They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education.... Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation.