===
Five young Muslim men from D.C. area — arrested in house owned by an extremist group — confess to Pakistani police that they went there to take part in 'jihad.'
Peace Prize in Wartime
Obama accepts Nobel Peace Prize, defends military force in Afghanistan as tool of 'global security' - just like Gore's peace prize, another fraud. -ed.
'Pressure' to Defend Climate-Gate
Scientist joins 1,700 others in signing U.K. statement defending climate data over fear of losing work
Search Intensifies for Dozens of Hunters
Authorities in northern Arizona ramp up search for 25 to 30 hunters stranded in sub-zero temperatures
Norway UFO Was Out-Of-Control Russian Rocket
A spectacular spiral of light was seen over the north of the country on Wednesday, prompting theories it was caused by a meteor, the Northern Lights or even aliens. But now Russia has revealed that its latest test-firing of its new intercontinental missile ended in failure — at the same time observers witnessed the early morning light show.
CEOs warn on jobs squeeze
THE fastest jobs growth in years sparks concerns Australia will face acute labour shortages.
Child-killer mums clash behind bars
TWO of Australia's most notorious child killers have clashed violently behind bars.
Friends of Tiger Woods' wife Elin Nordegren say she is heartbroken and devastated by the extent of his cheating but plans to stay married to him for their kids' sake
Violent threats in wine blackmail
ONE of the country's leading winemakers is at the centre of an alleged extortion attempt.
Teller nabbed on murder charge
IT only took Kaycee Henzon three months as a bank teller to befriend an elderly bank customer, steal $100,000 from her and then kill her, police allege.
34 warnings ignored before toddler killed
THE NSW Government has apologised for failing to protect Dean Shillingsworth, the toddler murdered by his mother.
US battles freezing winds, ice
HEAVY snow has blanketed much of the central US following a massive winter storm that left residents battling frigid temperatures and icy roads.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Health Care, Climate, & Jobs
Obama and the Dems are spending our dollars ... but, does their plan make sense? Karl Rove reacts!
===
Guest: Glenn Beck
Beck made Barbara Walter's "10 Most Fascinating" list. Now, he reacts to the fallout from being named!
===
Guest: Tim Donaghy
The ref at the center of the NBA gambling scandal speaks out! Greta gets the truth from Tim Donaghy.
=== Comments ===
Is It Possible That O'Reilly Was Right and Karl Rove Was Wrong?
By Bill O'Reilly
No doubt that Karl Rove is a very smart guy and has added greatly to "The Factor" with his political analysis.
Back in September, I told Mr. Rove that the public option component in Obamacare would eventually die because the president didn't really care about it. Mr. Rove disagreed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: I think the public option is gone. He threw it right out the window. So liberals are not going to like that. It's gone.
KARL ROVE, FORMER BUSH ADVISER: Bill, I don't agree with you. I think tonight he had a tougher tone on it than before.
O'REILLY: No.
ROVE: I hope you're right.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Well now it looks like I am correct, as the Senate has replaced the public option with some kind of mish-mash about private companies offering health insurance coverage under the tutelage of somebody in government. More incomprehensible gibberish, but for now the public option is off the table in the Senate.
The question: Why?
"Talking Points" believes that most Americans do not like the federal government telling them what to do. It's that simple.
Many Americans reject the feds dictating their medical decisions. That's what a public option is. If you sign up, the feds tell you you can do this but you can't do that.
The left loves that kind of big government intrusion. They want Washington to have as much power over you as possible, falsely believing that government will eventually impose social justice.
This is important. Social justice is when powerful people force citizens to share their wealth and their accomplishments so that the have-nots can have more.
If the feds run health care and can tell you what medical procedures are available to your family, that's an enormous amount of power and control over trillions of taxpayer dollars.
Basically, conservatives want power centralized locally. The right believes that individual freedom should trump federal interference. The left disagrees, and that's what this health care debate is all about.
Maybe in the end Karl Rove will be right. The public option could make a comeback, but I don't think so. The folks are leery about giving the feds more power, and they should be.
===
CARBONCINO
Tim Blair
Cheap coffee is Gaia’s friend:
An Edinburgh scientist has revealed the best way for coffee lovers to help save the planet – drink old-fashioned instant.Dull lights, slow cars, no meat … and rubbish coffee. Greentopia will be such a fun place to live.
Dr Dave Reay, a world-renowned expert on carbon emissions, has calculated that filter coffees pump 50 per cent more carbon into the atmosphere than cheaper instant coffees.
And he says that ditching expensive filter coffees could help reduce your carbon footprint by the same amount as a gas-guzzling flight across Europe.
===
EASY WAY OUT
Tim Blair
Seems about right:
No one likes to think of himself as a coward. People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it’s safer or more convenient, but because it’s the right thing … Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror’s bidding, it’s not because they’re terrified but because they’re socially concerned.
===
TESTED TO DESTRUCTION
Tim Blair
Crikey intellectual Guy Rundle:
Understand this clearly – more people now believe the Red-Green hypothesis, that capitalism is a system testing us to destruction in its current form, than go with the idea that it is some empty charade of communism by other means.Via Imre Salusinszky, who emails: “But Guy … I DON’T understand it clearly!”
===
LENS WIPED
Tim Blair
“When you confront him with the end of all his dreams, you have to wipe the flopsweat off the lens.” Quite:
===
ABC gives the Coalition 18 out of 18
Andrew Bolt
The ABC’s new blog site has turned, predictably, into another Leftist love in. Take Annabel Crabb: all 18 of her 18 articles so far are on the Coalition, and most are mocking. Search the rest of the blog and you’ll find not one on Labor.
Your taxes, their politics.
===
More man-made warming - this time in Alaska
Andrew Bolt
It’s the adjustments to the raw data - and almost always upwards - that produces so much of the 20th century warming. So how sound is the science behind those adjustments?
We’ve earlier marvelled at the amazing adjustments by which the IPCC created this warming in Northern Australia:
From these raw results:
Now climatologist Dr Richard Keen of the University of Colorada wonders how this warming in Alaska was produced by a supplier of IPCC data:
When Keen finds a warming in fact of just this:
Says Keen:
My averages show that the past three decades have shown no warming (since the PDO shift in 1977), and are in fact no warmer than the 1935-1944 decade. This is very different from the IPCC which shows a substantial warming over the past three decades....UPDATE
One can only guess what “corrections” were applied to the GHCN and IPCC data sets, but I can easily guess their magnitude – about 1 degree. Curiously, the magnitude of the adjustments is about the same as the “global warming” signal of the past century.
I’d be interested if other readers can provide similar comparisons with other parts of the world.
Professor Sinclair Davidson says the Rudd Government is right - Tony Abbott is hundreds of billions out when he says the Government could cost us $400 billion if it caves into the pressure at Copenhagen. Trouble is, the true cost is even more.
===
Out of the mouths of babes come a conniving adult’s words
Andrew Bolt
The Copenhagen meeting opened with a video of terrified children begging adults to stop global warming. Green fanatic Clive Hamilton writes creepy letters to my children to make them scared, too. A crying 18-year-old confronts Canada’s chief negotiator at a Copenhagen briefing (?). The Age today publishes an op-ed allegedly written by a 17-year-old who says she is also “scared”, and wants “a climate agreement”.
There is something profoundly immoral about terrifiying children for a political cause, and something profoundly anti-intellectual in demanding adults then heed the children’s cries to settle immensely complex questions of science and economics.
This tactic alone suggests on which side of this debate reason lies.
===
Bring on the immigration debate
Andrew Bolt
Not just good politics, but a critical debate:
SENIOR Opposition frontbencher Kevin Andrews has called for a debate on slashing Australia’s immigration from 180,000 people a year to a ‘’starting point’’ of just 35,000.I don’t know about the precise target, but I sure agree on the principle. This country is not putting in the services any more to cope with anywhere near the immigration levels we have now, with water, power and housing land all running short, and roads and public transport clogging up. That’s without even considering community cohesion - or the extra carbon dioxide emissions a Rudd Government would make us cut.
In his first interview since returning to the shadow cabinet as spokesman on families and community affairs, the former immigration minister questioned the ‘’blithe’’ acceptance of projections that the population will hit 35 million by 2050.
===
Saving the planet trumps saving people.
Andrew Bolt
Sudan, guilty of genocide, moralises over warming:
SUDANESE negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping said the draft [climate change] agreement showed Danish PM Lars Lokke Rasmussen was “desperate for success at any price”. Mr Di-Aping said the citizens of rich nations needed to force their governments to strike a better deal, pointing out that “in World War II many were willing to appease gross violations of human rights”.Denmark will overlook a president’s genocide if he just chats about warming:
AMNESTY International has learned that the Danish government has invited Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, to attend a meeting in Copenhagen on climate change in December. “Denmark needs to make it clear that it will arrest President al Bashir if he travels to Copenhagen,” said Christopher Keith Hall, senior legal adviser at Amnesty International.
===
Gore is grossly careless or a barefaced liar
Andrew Bolt
AL Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle.
No way did these leaked emails discredit his global warming crusade, he assured Slate magazine.
And you’d trust him, wouldn’t you? Like you trust our own doom-preaching Tim Flannery, for all his false predictions, dodgy memory, vested interests and frequent flying hypocrisy.
Yes, you trust Gore, this Nobel Prize laureate and Oscar winner, when he tells you that the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit don’t in fact show that the world’s most influential climate scientists used “tricks” to “hide the decline” in temperatures.
You trust him when he also denies that they show this powerful clique of scientists destroying inconvenient data, committing fraud, censoring sceptical scientists and privately admitting to doubts about the warming theory they publicly scream is settled.
No way would Gore cover up such stuff in defending his warmist cause, right?
No way, even if a British judge did rule that his film An Inconvenient Truth contained at least nine very convenient untruths. No way, even if he’s now the first man to reportedly make $1 billion from the global warming scare he did so much to create.
So you would believe Gore when he now gives his word - his considered opinion - that the Climategate emails are “sound and fury signifying nothing”.
As he explained: “I haven’t read all the emails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old.
===
Labor may do with bikini babes what Newman may not
Andrew Bolt
NOW put some clothes on the lady and explain to me the difference - but slowly, so even I can understand.
Let’s start with Sam.
Last year Channel 9 Footy Show star Sam Newman stuck a picture of a female sportswriter’s head on a bikini-clad mannequin, and that was so wickedly sexist that he had to be hounded off air, formally counselled and slagged off by every sanctimonious blowhard in the land.
“Punt the bastard,” screamed a typical headline, over a piece by Michael Costello, former chief of staff to Labor leader Kim Beazley.
Costello was sure feeling righteous on that day. Speaking on behalf of outraged women and their more unctuous gallants, he raged at the “low, sad, pathetic antics of sickos such as Newman”.
Now fast forward to this week, when many of this same Costello’s Labor cronies, Beazley included, crammed into the Guillame at Bennelong restaurant at the Sydney Opera House to celebrate the 80th birthday of former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.
There they all gathered, these black-tied representatives of the party that inflicted on us so many anti-discrimination laws and hired so many anti-discrimination police to nick the Newmans of this wayward world.
(God still laughs that Hawke, that once notorious womaniser, in 1984 gave Australia the Sex Discrimination Act, presumably as a public sign of repentance.)
There was Paul Keating, for instance, and Simon Crean, as well as Gough Whitlam, the always breathless Maxine McKew and glowering Greg Combet, the fierce global warming moralist.
Naturally, Pope Kevin Rudd turned up to give the blessing, since he’s always hogging microphones and always up for a moral sermon, delivered in words of the deadest bureaucratese, like this: “It’s very important for sporting organisations across the country to show leadership in demonstrating proper respect towards women.”
And then it was party time. The band struck up ... and, golly, the clothes came off.
===
Since I’ve meantime sent more soldiers to Afghanistan….
Andrew Bolt
You can’t deny the student-president has given us entertainment:
President Barack Obama entered the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners Thursday with humble words, acknowledging his own few accomplishments while delivering a robust defense of war...UPDATE
Public Policy Polling tests potential 2012 presidential match ups:
Obama 46%, Huckabee 45%Conclusion:
Obama 47%, Romney 42%
Obama 50%, Palin 44%
Obama 48%, Pawlenty 35%
The importance of these numbers 35 months before Obama has to stand for reelection is obviously limited but it does seem pretty clear that his electoral position is weaker than it was a year ago at this time.In fact:
Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise...
===
Climategate: rounding up a posse - at gunpoint
Andrew Bolt
Britain’s compromised Met Office is rounding up people for a petition to pooh-pooh the significance of Climategate. No relevant qualifications are required, and no inquiry beforehand is needed. Oh, and if you don’t sign....
More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.By those standards, these 1700 signatories are outvoted by the 31,000 scientists who freely signed this:
One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change…
Met Office reports on temperature changes draw on the work of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, from which the e-mails were hacked. Phil Jones, unit director, has agreed to stand down while an investigation takes place into claims that he manipulated data to exaggerate the warming trend and tried to block publication of alternative views.
One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
===
I haven’t found top gear yet
Andrew Bolt
The next time I think I’ve been too tough on some politician, I’ll console myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t as tough as Jeremy Clarkson:
I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.From a Sunday Times article since pulled, so you’ll have to go find any links yourself.
===
Whose Paris?
Andrew Bolt
It would indeed be confronting - almost a challenge - to have your city streets taken over by an imported faith in such an exclusionary way, especially when traffic regulation is left to that faith’s marshals:
So I’m not surprised that some Parisien locals have now written to their President demanding the return of their streets. Nor am I surprised that this debate is getting ugly, much as I regret it.
===
Climategate: the search for a proper noun
Andrew Bolt
How I’ve struggled. Do I call them warmists? Alarmists? Warming alarmists? Warming believers? I’ve used all of the above, with less than complete satisfaction.
But could this finally be my answer?:
Warm-mongers
===
NO COMMENT
Tim Blair
Straight-talking Kevin Rudd on Bob’s stripper party:
I am not going to comment on the artistic merit or otherwise of what was provided by way of the entertainment.
===
Rudd’s policies working brilliantly
Andrew Bolt
Yet another:
A boat carrying 60 suspected asylum seekers has eluded border protection authorities to arrive at Christmas Island on Thursday afternoon.
===
FOUR STARS
Tim Blair
A shooter is deleted by NYC police. The reviews are in:
Emer Rooney, 33, a visitor from Ireland on the last day of a trip to New York, walked with a friend from a nearby hotel to take pictures of the scene. She said she had never felt unsafe in New York. “I actually feel it’s very safe,” she said. “Look at all the police officers.” She cited the shooting, in fact, as one of the more exciting moments of her trip, including recovering lost luggage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and getting tickets to the musical “Wicked.”
A tourist from Australia, Suzanne Davis, 42, stopped to take images with a video recorder. “It’s my first day in New York, so it makes very real what you see in the movies,” she said.
===
Blessings of the blog
Andrew Bolt
Lovely to see readers of this blog doing well:
As Blanche’s hapless beau Mitch, tenor Stuart Skelton is entirely convincing ...And:
Stuart Skelton as Mitch and Halloran as Stella delivered the stand-out performances of the evening. Skelton’s voice is beautiful ...And:
Stuart Skelton is establishing himself as one of the world’s leading heldentenors. This year has already seen him as Siegmund in Wagner’s Die Walküre in Zurich and Seattle, and the title role of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes for ENO in London...I hope to judge for myself tomorrow. If you wish to as well, book here for Opera Australia’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
Skelton recently in Peter Grimes:
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