Inconvenient Truth for Gore as Arctic Ice Claims Don't Add Up
The former vice president said new research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years, but the scientist his estimate was based on denies the timeline.
White House will announce President Obama has directed the federal government to acquire a rural Illinois prison to house terror detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
Green light for internet filter plans
The Federal Government will introduce compulsory internet filtering to block overseas sites which contain criminal content, including child sex abuse and sexual violence. - The federal government is attempting this move while the attention of the media is on the Global Warming fiasco. This is abysmal legislation which will copy China's abuse of power in censorship. - ed.
Fox News' Greg Palkot gets a rare, up-close look at America's most elite fighting force in Afghanistan, the Special Force teams, who wage the counter-insurgency fight from village to village, house to house — while helping to build a nation.
800,000 H1N1 Vaccine Doses Recalled
Hundreds of thousands of pediatric H1N1 vaccine doses may not be potent enough to protect against virus
Australia to relax terror laws
AIR travellers will be allowed to eat with metal cutlery and take sharp objects on board from next year
Three hurt in office explosion
MEN severely burnt and scores of workers evacuated following an explosion in an office building
Time to find an extra $300 for your bills
HOUSEHOLDS will need to find hundreds of extra dollars each year to pay utility bills.
Teen girl dies in go-kart strangling
A TEENAGE girl has died after her scarf got caught in a go-kart and strangled her.
Miss Universe entrant in booze scandal
MISS Universe hopeful Lauryn Eagle is in a world of trouble after being accused of lying to police.
RailCorp expands fat cats
RAILCORP has jacked up the number of its senior executives by more than 10 per cent and flown them on a record 23 overseas junkets this year alone.
Killer mates get 43 years in jail together
TWO childhood friends have been jailed for the "barbaric" murder of teenager Damien Everett outside a primary school in Victoria.
HSC science shows girls are in top form
FEMALE HSC students driven by passion and talent have topped the state in five of the major science subjects and also made further inroads into the traditional male stronghold of mathematics. Girls have come first in physics, chemistry, biology, Earth and environmental science and senior science, reinforcing a trend as they increasingly target high-powered careers in elite areas such as medicine. But the demanding HSC English Extension 2 course has been taken out by a male student, Lawrence Wallis, attending his local comprehensive high school in Sydney's west. - these students have performed brilliantly, but it is tragic that their results are undermined by the government ideologues who have skewed the testing to favor gender. - ed.
Council swoops on filthy Bondi hoarder house
IN THE end, the bulldozer and workmen cleaning out the infamous Bondi garbage house moved too fast for Elena and Ilianna Bobolas.
Elderly man and son stabbed in home
A 79-year-old man and his son have been attacked with knives and baseball bats by a gang of teenage thugs who ransacked their home and fled with cash.
Lucky escape as car's cruise control jams
A MAN thought he would die when his car stuck on cruise control on the freeway at 100km/h.
Earth on the brink of crisis, says Charles
ONLY global action can save Earth now, Prince Charles told world leaders at the Copenhagen climate change summit. - it will be a tragedy for the UK if this guy ever becomes king. -ed.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Government Land Grab?
Could your property be on their list? It's our eye opening series on 'Special Report'
===
Reading, Writing, and Race?
Is one of the country's top universities teaching "white guilt?" John Stossel investigates!
===
Mac Attack!
The senator opens up about taking on the most critical issues facing our country!
=== Comments ===
President Obama Grades Himself
By Bill O'Reilly
Speaking to Oprah Winfrey, the president was asked what grade he should receive after 11 months in office.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Good solid B+.
OPRAH WINFREY: A B+?
OBAMA: Yeah. I, I mean, I think that we have inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
WINFREY: So B+. What could you have done better?
OBAMA: Well, B+ because of the things that are undone.
WINFREY: OK.
OBAMA: Health care is not yet signed. If I get health care passed, we tip into A-.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
"Talking Points" is not surprised by Mr. Obama's B+ posture. He's always been a confident man, a person who believes he is fighting the good fight. But the president has to know that many Americans are losing confidence in his administration.
Click here to watch Bill's "Talking Points"!
The latest Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll says that 42 percent of American voters now strongly disprove of the president's job performance. Just 24 percent strongly approve.
In addition, 52 percent of Americans now say global warming is not caused by human activity. Just 37 percent say it is. Twelve percent aren't sure. So another big Obama cause is sliding.
Now, Sunday night on "60 Minutes," the president expressed anger with the banking industry.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street. You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it's gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem, and we've got 10 percent unemployment. Why do you think people might be a little frustrated?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
In theory, Mr. Obama is correct. Any American company receiving government handouts can't be giving large bonuses to employees. It's simply unacceptable. Also, the entire financial community should be sensitive to the fact that many Americans are suffering.
Again, the president is correct to point that out.
Right now, the Obama administration wants more regulation over banking and financial transactions. In theory, that sounds good. But remember the Barney Frank-Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac debacle. The feds do not have a great track record in the financial arena. We owe $12 trillion.
So this might just be hype by President Obama in attempt to rally the folks.
Now last week on "Good Morning America," I graded the president this way: B on jobs, C on Afghanistan, D on health care. Even though some Obama detractors objected to the jobs grade, I stand by it. Stats show the job situation was much better last month than earlier this year. Much better.
It is important to be fair to Barack Obama, because if you hate him then legitimate criticism is brushed aside. The man has done some things correct.
However, two huge problems loom: out of control spending, which could absolutely bankrupt the nation, and the Iranian nuclear threat. Those issues along with the health care chaos will most likely define Barack Obama in 2010.
===
Joyce or the media pack? No contest
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann says Barnaby Joyce is less worrying than his critics:
BARNABY said some silly things last week. Much sillier were the things said by those who jumped on him. Especially the Canberra Press Gallery collective, the government and former ANZ economist Saul Eslake.===
Barnaby - no surname needed, and that’s partly why he sparked such a visceral reaction; he’s hated for being effective - said essentially three things.
The US and Queensland could default on their debts - an interesting pairing - and we should ban Chinese government investment.
All could have been better put. But which is sillier? What Barnaby said or Eslake lecturing him pompously as only Eslake can, that of course the US couldn’t default as its debts are in US dollars: it could just print more?
Technically Eslake is right: that’s not a default. But is he seriously suggesting that we should take comfort in the ‘non-default’ of the US printing trillions of dollars of paper money, Germany-1920s style? Oh, that’s all right then.
Then we had Radio National’s Fran Kelly adding her two-bobs worth; instructing Barnaby that how could the US possibly be at risk when it was triple-A rated. Seemingly blithely unaware of all the securities rated triple-A that blew up and gave us the global financial meltdown.
The substantive point Barnaby was making about Queensland was that it was sliding into a debt hole; and Kelly take note, has already been downgraded by the ratings agencies she seems to think are infallible.
HUMANKIND DECIDES
Tim Blair
The competing forces of Climategate and Copenhagen have crushed British zoologist George Monbiot’s mind. Observe:
This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves.You mean like in Dance Dance Revolution?
===
HERESY IS BEAUTIFUL
Tim Blair
Former UK government chief scientific advisor Sir David King shrieks:
Good heavens! What are you saying is not settled enough? The science of climate change?===
Manne can’t even keep track of his insults
Andrew Bolt
Let it not be said that the author of Left, Right, Left never changes his mind.
Here’s Professor Robert Manne doing Heckling 101 in Octoboer 2006:
DR GERARD HENDERSON: Well, I did Politics 101 too. I mean, I know that but - - -Here’s Professor Robert Manne doing Heckling 101 in December 2009:
PROF ROBERT MANNE: 101 is American. We don’t do it here.
...if Andrew Bolt or George Pell were required to take an examination in climate science 101 both would comprehensively fail(Thanks to reader Peter.)
===
Cutting wealth, not emissions
Andrew Bolt
Other than this, and the higher prices and power blackouts, it won’t hurt a bit, honest:
THE amended emissions trading scheme put forward by the Government threatens to wipe off about 3 per cent of the value of Australia’s top 200 companies, according to research to be released today…And then there are the fines the United Nations will impose on us - fines some countries already face under the Kyoto Protocol:
An analysis of the revised plan by carbon risk firm RepuTex and Arbor Partners, consultants to institutional investors, shows that indirect factors such as electricity and supply chain costs, will make up 60 per cent of the total carbon liability of S&P/ASX 200 companies.
That would add $3.1 billion to the $2.1 billion in direct costs companies face through trading permits.
Because of breaches of its emissions target under the Kyoto Protocol, Canada owes about $1 billion...(Thanks to readers Andrew and Alistair.)
===
US drowning
Andrew Bolt
But Barnaby Joyce must not say this:
The US is heading for a public debt crisis unless action is taken soon to stabilise debt relative to national income, a bipartisan group of former congressmen, White House officials and budget experts warned on Monday.(Thanks to reader Frank.)
===
Better late than never to hold this debate
Andrew Bolt
The tide has turned. The Daily Express’s 100 reasons here.
===
Cruising for a bruising
Andrew Bolt
A story to freak every driver with cruise control:
THE driver of a runaway car stuck on cruise control hurtling along Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway at 100km/h said last night he was convinced he was going to die.
Travelling on the wrong side of the road and hysterical, Chase Weir, 22, found himself racing toward a wall of cars when a frantic police radio operator ordered him to slam on the brakes.
“She told me to jump on the brake and pull the handbrake at the same time, which I did,’’ a still shaken Mr Weir said.
“I just shut my eyes. I could hear the tyres skidding on the road for what seemed like forever. I thought I was dead....”
Mr Weir’s 30-minute ordeal began about 12.40pm while travelling in the outbound lane of the Eastern Freeway on his way to Greensborough.
After moving to take the Burke Rd exit, he realised the cruise control in his 2002 Ford Explorer was stuck and his car was unable to slow down.
He was told there were police cars in front of him and more arriving to help stop his car. Other police cars provided an escort and assisted in clearing the way along Eastlink, as 000 operators contacted Ford to try to find a solution.
The car was moved over to left lanes as police lights and sirens cleared a path. Mr Weir told police he tried to brake, knock the car out of gear and remove the keys, all to no avail.
===
More than a game
Andrew Bolt
It’s easy to mock Australia’s obsession with sport as a triumph of brawn over brains. But hear Sudanese-born Majak Daw - a most impressive young man - talk of being selected by North Melbourne. The accent, the choice of our national game, the modesty, the intelligence - and all shown on the great stage of Australian football.
Australian Rules in particular is not a mere sport. It is a social glue. Daw’s example will draw many Sudanese into one of the great Australian traditions, and will reassure many other Australians that Sudanese such as Daw do indeed wish to be of us, and not just next to us.
===
Rudd flattered with “sceptic” claim
Andrew Bolt
Copenhagen sure is giving entertainment value:
The chief negotiator for China and the small African nations at Copenhagen has accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of lying to the Australian people about his position on climate change.That’s certainly true of his MPs:
Lumumba Di-Aping represents China and the G77 group of small countries in the Copenhagen talks…
“The message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it’s fiction,” he said.
“It does not relate to the facts because his actions are climate change scepticism in action...”
A staggering 225 out of the 243 private-plated cars chosen by MPs and Senators have six or eight-cylinder engines, in contrast to the national trend towards smaller, more fuel efficient models.===
Take down this Rabbit-Proof Fence
Andrew Bolt
I AM often asked to talk at schools and almost always ask students three questions about a film that lies about the “stolen generations”.
First: “How many of you have been shown Rabbit-Proof Fence?”
Answer: every one.
Second: “Have you been shown the movie as a great piece of film-making, or as a history lesson?”
Answer: in every case as history. You know, like you learn America’s history from John Wayne movies.
And third: “How many of you have checked whether the film is actually true, by, say, reading the book on which it’s based?”
Answer: of thousands of students, just two have raised their hand.
And that alone is reason enough for me to agree with historian Keith Windschuttle, who this week called for Rabbit-Proof Fence to be banned from our schools for being “grossly inaccurate”.
Lies are being taught as truth, and until the teachers know the difference, it’s mischievous and damaging to so deceive young children about their country’s past.
Windschuttle examines the truthfulness of Rabbit-Proof Fence in the third volume of his ground-breaking series, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which this time dissects the myth of the “stolen generations”.
Readers of my own columns over the years will be familiar with the evidence he presents against this award-winning film by Phillip Noyce - a film made with $5.3 million of taxpayers’ money to convince hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren that their country is so racist it really did steal 100,000 children just because they were Aboriginal.
As I’ve demonstrated before, the very first words spoken in Noyce’s film are already a lie: “This is a true story.”
This “true story” is meant to be that of Molly Craig, then 14, and her two cousins - Daisy, 8, and Gracie, 11 - who were taken in 1931 from an Aboriginal camp at Jigalong, in Western Australia’s north, and sent to a school at the Moore River Native Settlement, 2000km south, from which they escaped to trek all the way home again.
The film purports to show how the girls were stolen from loving parents by racist whites in a genocide that Noyce’s publicity material claimed was “more cruel than could ever be imagined”.
Yet when Craig was shown this “true story” at a special screening in her bush camp seven years ago, she protested: “That’s not my story.”
She was right. It isn’t.
===
King William will slay the republicans
Andrew Bolt
AUSTRALIA’S republicans, who’ve seemed like vultures on the fence of Buckingham Palace, will this week have felt their dinner slipping away.
Ever since they lost the republican referendum a decade ago, they’ve consoled themselves with the thought they’ll at least get their feed once this hugely respected Queen finally dies.
Malcolm Turnbull, former head of the Australian Republican Movement, said last year loyal Australians would finally feel free to bury the monarchy with her.
“The next time when you would have your best prospects (of a republic) is at the end of the Queen’s reign - when she dies or when she abdicates,” he mused.
Greg Barns, who replaced Turnbull as the ARM’s chairman in 1999, has said much the same: “Last year in the north-eastern Victorian town of Corryong a group of women in their 60s and 70s gathered in the main street for their morning cuppa. All six of these women told me that they would vote for a republic once the Queen Mother had died and Elizabeth had also died or abdicated in favour of Charles.”
Well, the Queen Mum has indeed since died, but is Barns any closer to that dream of a King Charles - and, even better, Queen Camilla?
===
A memorial to mark where Australia lost
Andrew Bolt
How ludicrous and dangerous for an Australian council to involve itself in imported inter-ethnic disputes and even side with a “winner”:
MORE than 200 members of Sydney’s Turkish and Assyrian communities were separated by police outside the Fairfield Council offices last night after the council approved plans for a monument commemorating what was called the Assyrian genocide. At least 40 police stood between the two groups as the council considered plans for the first ever Australian memorial to Assyrians killed by Turkish forces during World War I and subsequent conflicts…The Assyrians win, and Australia loses. Shame.
At 7.30pm the council voted to approve the monument, producing a spontaneous outburst by the Assyrians. ‘’Winner, winner, winner - thank you Australia,’’ one jubilant Assyrian said
===
The Greens and their demons
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello analyses the Greens’ failure in his former seat and offers them advice they cannot take - since it is to abandon what gives them life:
The Greens have a moral superiority complex. In their mind they are not only right but virtuous, which makes their opponents not only wrong but immoral. This is why Hamilton has compared climate sceptics with Holocaust deniers - if you disagree with his policies you are complicit in, or covering, up mass murder. Robert Manne, who launched the campaign for Hamilton, put it this way: ‘’If the Greens can achieve a breakthrough in the byelections … [this] might come to be seen as a turning point in the moral history of this country.’’How critical is sanctimony to a green activist? Judge by another piece on the same page of The Age, by George Monbiot. Here’s how he characterises the sceptics he opposes, and the questions to be settled:
In Melbourne on December 5 electors could have turned to good from evil, to Green from Liberal. Instead, by voting Liberal out of concern for their children’s education, or for the lack of aged care, or for their job or business, they demonstrated moral inferiority.
One day it might dawn on Brown, Manne and Hamilton that voters do not like moral condescension. Sanctimony can make you feel good, but it rarely appeals to those listening.
The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy… ... A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right....To Monbiot, who ironically is angrier by far than almost anyone he abuses, the debate over what is really warming the planet is a question of right or wrong, but of good or evil, self-sacrifice or selfishness. Global warming is no more than a convenient battleground in a wider ideological war, in which the enemy are all monsters.
The angry men who seek to derail this agreement ... know at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.... They too are aware that this is a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.
Or, as I would put it instead, this is a battle between the age-old totalitarian instinct and the love of freedom and reason.
But goodness is not best advertised by Monbiot’s demonisations and shrill abuse of people very bit as moral as he, if not more. Let’s settle down and meet where we can at least talk - by treating this first of all as a question of economics and science, and not a preening contest between moral egoists.
INCIDENTALLY, let’s not overlook the fact that the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, both of which published Monbiot’s sceptics-bashing column, still refuse to run the ones he wrote on Climategate. You know, the one that started like this:
It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.And the other like this:
I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.Now why, of all Monbiot’s columns, did the SMH and Age overlook these?
===
Google drops Gore
Andrew Bolt
Hmm. Google has removed the links to Al Gore’s climate evangelism from its home page. I can only hope it’s realised its proper role is to provide the information we seek, and not to stuff down our throats the information it prefers. It’s there to be a big help, not Big Brother.
UPDATE
Gore refuses to answer questions about another of his deceptions:
===
Your money, Rudd’s spending
Andrew Bolt
Stephen Kirchner on the arrogance of politicians in deciding your money is best spent by them:
In Australia, commonwealth government spending was pushing 20 per cent of gross domestic product before Gough Whitlam came to power. The Rudd government has taken the commonwealth’s expenditure share to 27.8 per cent of GDP this financial year, following the biggest increase in federal spending since Whitlam. Spending by all levels of government in Australia was about 34 per cent of GDP in 2007-08, even before the federal government’s stimulus…===
But how big should government be?…
The threshold at which the government share of GDP begins to reduce rather than promote economic growth is necessarily imprecise. Gerald Scully calculated that the optimal size of government for the US and New Zealand was between 19 per cent and 23 per cent of GDP. It would be surprising if the optimal size of government were any larger in Australia. Remarkably, John Maynard Keynes took a similar view. Keynes agreed on 25 per cent as the maximum tolerable proportion of taxation.
If you can’t control your staff, you can’t control performance
Andrew Bolt
But of course, and it’s astonishing it’s already not so:
SCHOOL principals are calling for the power to hire and fire teachers and manage their schools if they are to be held accountable for student results with the publication of national performance reports next month…And with such extra responsibilities must come much higher salaries - and much easier mechanisms for sacking failing principals, too.
The presidents of the primary and secondary school principal associations, Leonie Trimper and Andrew Blair, argue that international research shows a direct correlation between a principal’s ability to select staff and school results…
Ms Trimper… said matching the needs of the school and its students with the expertise and skills of the teacher would improve the system.
“Name any company that sits back for Centrelink to ring and say, `Here’s your 10 staff’,” she said. “It just doesn’t happen.”
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