Friday, February 19, 2010

Headlines Friday 19th February 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

"Philosophic Cock," is a political cartoon I used when I was teaching U.S. History. The cartoon depicts Thomas Jefferson "courting" Sally Hemings. Jefferson's political opponents used it to correctly discredit Jefferson during the 1804 election.
=== Bible Quote ===
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”- Romans 8:38-39
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Tony Abbott has given a candid account of his sex life, saying it's one of "life's greatest pleasures" and that he wished he could have more while on the campaign trail


Software engineer who left diatribe railing about IRS dies after flying single-engine plane into Texas office building that houses federal tax employees

New Fears of Iranian Nukes
IAEA worried Iran may currently be making warhead, suggesting Tehran resumed work or never stopped

Fed Raises Key Interest Rate
Federal Reserve raises its discount rate, but says move does not signal change in its outlook for the economy

No 'Sin City' Summit for President
Las Vegas mayor refuses to meet with Obama, unless he apologizes for advising people to save rather than gamble

Garrett dumps insulation scheme
PETER Garrett has put a stop to the controversial insulation rebate scheme as well as solar rebates.

Pants-down Brown 'abused aides with C-word'
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown allegedly abused two aides using the C-word while half-dressed in a hotel bedroom during a trip to the US. The Sun reported that Mr Brown was furious the media had discovered US President Obama repeatedly snubbed his attempts to have a one-on-one meeting and took his anger out on two aides - while wearing just his pants in a hotel bedroom. He hurled abuse at senior foreign affairs adviser, Stewart Wood, saying: “You’re a c..t.” Mr Brown then allegedly turned on another aide, branding him "an even bigger c..t". The episode is believed to be contained in a bombshell new book on the Government by commentator Andrew Rawnsley.

Unsafe worker can't be sacked
COMPANY forced to reinstate worker because of his poor education and job prospects.

Cyberattacks Reportedly Traced to Computers in Chinese Schools
Questions remain about whether the Chinese government was involved in the attacks. The recent cyberattacks on Google and other American companies have been traced by investigators to computers at two schools in China, including one with ties to the Chinese military, according to a New York Times report citing unnamed inside sources. The Times report also says that the attacks began much earlier than first thought, as far back as April, though questions remain about whether the Chinese government was involved in the attacks. The United States has urged Beijing to investigate the computer attacks against Google, but China has denied involvement in the Internet attacks and defended its online restrictions as lawful.

Young girl kidnapped, sexually assaulted
GIRL, 8, manages to walk home after being abducted from her bed in the middle of the night.

Beaches claim doesn't wash with locals
PENNY Wong's claim beaches could erode away appears to be an attempt to panic the public.

Eddie McGuire on thin ice over gay jibes
EDDIE McGuire and Mick Molloy criticised over quips made about the men's ice skating.

Death to cane toads with pet food
AUSTRALIA'S poisonous plague of cane toads has finally met its match in a can of cat food.

Mum reveals sorrow over drowned son
DROWNED school camper Kyle Vassil, 12, vowed to be man of the house when his parents spl

Harbour hero dives in to save pensioner
A CHARTER boat employee has been hailed a hero after jumping 4m into Sydney Harbour to rescue an 84-year-old who fell in outside the Opera House.

Man arrested after teacher killed
ARMED police rush to a school in Germany, after a man allegedly goes on a deadly rampage.
=== Journalists Corner ===

The first lady on her passionate fight against childhood obesity!
What's the driving force behind her "Let's Move" campaign?
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Exclusive: Sen. Scott Brown
He got the job done in the Bay State! Now, what's his plan to get the rest of the country back to work? Scott reveals his strategy.
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The Brothers Beckel
A liberal commentator. A conservative actor. Now, they battle over Obama's policies!
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A Classroom Crisis!
Does the government have too much control over where students go & who's teaching them? John uncovers the best way for America to educate.

=== Comments ===
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Obama
By Bill O'Reilly
A recent field poll says Governor Schwarzenegger's job approval rating is -- ready -- 27 percent, down from 65 percent shortly after he took office. The reason for Arnold's collapse is that the Golden State is bankrupt. Can't pay its bills. Has a $20 billion-dollar deficit. $20 billion.

Now seven years ago, Californians booted out Democratic Governor Gray Davis in an embarrassing recall vote, and Arnold walked into power. Today, 59 percent of Californians say the governor will leave the state worse off than it was when Davis was booted. And here's why you should care. What is happening here in California is also happening in Washington, D.C.

Thursday, President Obama will sign an executive order creating a debt commission, where a bunch of Americans will try to figure out how to stop massive federal spending. Okay, fine. But it's mostly a waste of time. If you want to stop spending, stop spending. Why do you need some pinhead commission to tell us that?

A new CNN poll says just 44 percent of Americans would vote for President Obama in 2012 as things stand now. 52 percent would vote against him. There's no question America is in serious trouble. And the folks know it. We are wasting billions of dollars every year. And health care entitlements, the military budget, Social Security, all of those things are out of control.

Liberal Americans will say the president should raise taxes to slam down the deficit. Well, that's what Governor Arnold did here in California. That's what he did. And here's what happened. Unemployment skyrocketed. It's now 12.5 percent. Companies left the state. And so did many wealthy people. So the tax hike worked against the California economy. And the same thing would happen at the federal level if Obama raises taxes.

So, with the economy in bad shape, that can't happen. Tax hikes have to be postponed. I can foresee a 2 percent national sales tax somewhere down the road, but not now. Today, it's spending cuts on everything that must be implemented. That means crazy left politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid out of here. Have to go. And this lunacy about the federal government running the economy has to disappear.

The Feds should make sure there's no corruption in our economy, but they can't run it. And that means the health care realm as well. President Obama should take a good look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. They have a lot in common. Both are charismatic. Both ran as outsiders. Both won. But Arnold has failed. And if Mr. Obama doesn't see that, it could happen to him. He's not living in the real world.
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FLANNERY BRINGS IT
Tim Blair
Having observed his near-miraculous delivery of rainfall to previously dry areas – not to mention his creation of a legitimate hockey stick – Penny Wong last November appointed watermaster Tim Flannery as chair of her Coasts and Climate Change Council. Result: instant rain!
There is so much water in Sunshine Coast dams this morning that if another 100,000 people arrived tomorrow, and it did not rain for another three years, no one would go thirsty.

Rain during the past two weeks and heavy catchment downpours in the past 48 hours have filled most Coast dams to capacity and would guarantee four years’ supply for the present population of 300,000.
Flannery’s coastal work is done. Move him inland.
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ON FROZEN POND
Tim Blair
Following recent British advances in health and safety, one scofflaw lets down the whole team:
A fireman who saved a pet dog from a frozen pond is now facing disciplinary action for allegedly breaching healthy and safety rules.
A good thing, too. Unless this fellow is sternly dealt with, he could end up rescuing dying children. Downunder, we apply health and safety regulations in reverse:
The nation’s industrial umpire has ruled that a long-term employee who was legitimately sacked for repeated safety breaches must be reinstated and paid compensation because of his poor education and poor job prospects.
Just send him to Britain.
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GAIA TURNS
Tim Blair
I blamed global warming – it’s usually a safe bet – but it seems the problem was global colding:
Record cold in Florida during the first week of January, accompanied by severe storms hitting the area last week, could have caused the pavement to become gouged between turns 1 and 2 of Daytona International Speedway.
(Via Dan F., who emails: “Now the great encoldening has gone too far ...")
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SMALL CHANGE
Tim Blair
Barack Obama’s version of Kevin Rudd’s ecological-economy program hasn’t killed anybody (yet) or set fire to any homes (so far) – but it’s barely done anything else besides:
Who could forget the $5 billion in Obama administration stimulus money that was going to rapidly create nearly 90,000 green jobs across the country in these tough economic times and make so many thousands of homes all snuggy and warm and energy-efficient these very snowy days?

Well, a new report due out this morning will show the $5-billion program is so riddled with drafts that so far it’s weatherized only about 9,000 homes.

Based on the initial Obama-Biden program promise that it would create 87,000 new jobs its first year, that would be about 10 jobs for each home weatherized so far. Makes for pretty crowded doorways.
The cost per house: about $US57,362. Thus are revealed again the only options available under leftist regimes: debt or death.

(Via Mystery Meat, who emails: “Can we borrow Peter Garrett for awhile?” Yes. Yes, you can. We’ll FedEx him in a fireproof container.)
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YVO GOES
Tim Blair
This site, February 9: “It’s interesting how greenoids are reacting to pressure, following years in which their view dominated. Some quit; others are contemplating suicide.” Yvo de Boer chooses the former option:
Yvo de Boer, the top UN climate change official, announced last night that he was resigning after a tumultuous four years in the job, marked by the failure to convince governments to agree on a post-Kyoto deal and revelations of a series of blunders in the UN’s 2007 report on climate change.
Bye de bye, de Boer. He’s headed for safer ground:
Mr de Boer will become a consultant on climate and sustainability issues for global accounting firm KPMG and will be associated with several universities.
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THEY ARE NEVER RIGHT
Tim Blair
The Guardian, February, 2009:
The world’s pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.

In an update on the latest science on climate change, the US Congress was told that melting snow pack could lead to severe drought from California to Oklahoma. In the midwest, diminishing rains and shrinking rivers were lowering water levels in the Great Lakes, even to the extent where it could affect shipping.

“With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the south-west is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle,” said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science. He went on to warn of scorching temperatures in an array of cities. Sacramento in California, for example, could face heatwaves for up to 100 days a year.

“We are close to a threshold in a very large number of American cities where uncomfortable heatwaves make cities uninhabitable,” Field told the Senate’s environment and public works committee.
ABC News (US), February, 2010:
In the span of just a couple years, the U.S. has gone from very high drought conditions to the lowest amount of drought in the last 10 years, [Doug LeCompte of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association] says. “It’s only a few times, really, in the last century that we’ve had this little of the country in drought. That is unusual.”
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MONEY FOR MUPPETS
Tim Blair
Prepare your pitchforks, taxpayers of Britain:
A disastrous series of failed climate change publicity stunts cost taxpayers £9million, it emerged yesterday.

The projects paid for by the Government’s Climate Challenge Fund did next to nothing to change public opinion, a Whitehall report found.

It said the initiatives were almost entirely preaching to the converted and that trying to drum up interest through sensationalism only put people off.
That’s nearly $16 million. Makes my weekly Exxon payment look almost puny by comparison.
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Lateline hears what it wants to
Andrew Bolt
The headline on Lateline’s transcript of its interview with the Rudd Government’s global warming advisor, Ross Garnaut:
Coalition’s climate policy an abomination, says Garnaut
The Coalition’s policy is the “abomination”? In fact, Garnaut was attacking Labor’s:
TONY JONES: Let’s get this straight, though. Are you saying that the Minister, Penny Wong, and that her assistant Minister Greg Combet, in their compromises with the then Liberal leadership late last year, committed an abomination?

PROF ROSS GARNAUT: I am describing the policy. I am not attributing the abomination to any individuals, Tony.
You hear what you want to hear. That’s why some people still claim the theory of catastrophic man-made warming is strong.

(Thanks to reader Tony.)

UPDATE

Lateline changes its headline, now that we’ve established Garnaut thought it was Labor’s policy that was an “abomination”, and not the Coalition’s,

The simplest way to have done that would, of course, be to have changed just one word in an otherwise accurate headline, like this:
Labor’s climate policy an abomination, says Garnaut
But Lateline, so keen to headline a Coalition abomination, is more discreet when it’s Labor’s instead. It’s new headline is actually:

Climate change compensation an abomination, says Garnaut
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Wong to the IPCC’s rescue
Andrew Bolt
Climate Change Ministe Penny Wong defends the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change against allegations of fraud, exaggeration, cherrypicking, collusion, error, vested interest, exclusion of sceptics, alarmism and politicisation.

Well, she defends the IPCC against some of that.

I’ve been battling today to make deadlines on my columns, and will have to wait to fisk this desperate and misleading, not to mention deceitful, speech. In the meantime I pass it to you to do with it as it deserves.

But I think it’s a sign of panic.
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The best spin for Rudd's ALP is that Indonesia just slimed Rudd
Andrew Bolt
Hard to believe, but if true…
AUSTRALIAN embassy officials in Jakarta have told Indonesian authorities the possible executions of three of the Bali Nine is a highly sensitive issue for the Rudd government in an election year.

The representation was made by the embassy’s political counsellor, Paul Griffiths, and comes as the three Australians, Scott Rush, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, prepare their final appeals against the death sentence…

‘’They told us that it was a sensitive political issue ahead of the election,’’ Didiek Darmanto, a spokesman for the attorney-general, told the Herald.
It’s denied, of course, and by a man I consider honorable in the genuine, not Shakesperean, sense:
Australia’s government on Thursday denied asking Indonesia to avoid executing three Australian drug smugglers this year out of concern it would harm Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s re-election fight…

“We would never tie the circumstances of people facing potentially death row or of consular cases or of people in trouble, we would never tie that to the election cycle,” Acting Foreign Minister Simon Crean told Australian radio.
Julia Gillard, too:
Ms Gillard told reporters in Brisbane on Thursday there had been some discussions between Australian representatives and those of the attorney-general in Indonesia, but political issues were not mentioned.

“I understand that those discussions did touch on matters associated with the Bali Nine,” she said.
“But, as I’m advised, the reports in today’s newspapers that there was a discussion of elections and political events in Australia, that that report is simply incorrect.”
If, in fact, the reports are correct, then this Government may well be finished. If they are false, as I suspect, all that’s cactus is the Rudd Government’s relationship with Indonesia.

Or is the explanation just a lousy form of words, retold by someone even sloppier?
Indonesian authorities are standing by claims Australian diplomats cautioned them about the political sensitivities of executing members of the Bali Nine in an election year.

Despite denials from Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Acting Foreign Minister Simon Crean, Indonesian attorney-general’s office spokesman Didiek Darmanto said the report in Thursday’s Fairfax newspapers was correct.

”They admitted that for the upcoming election, the issue of the death sentences is a sensitive issue,” Darmanto told AAP.

Darmanto said the issue was discussed during a “courtesy visit” by the embassy’s new political counsellor, Paul Griffiths.

“They didn’t ask for the death sentence execution to be postponed because of the election, but they just needed to understand the process,” Darmanto said.
(Thanks to reader Geoffrey.)
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Rudd could well lose if he can’t fake sincerity
Andrew Bolt
Even ABC Radio National’s Fran Kelly can see the wheels are falling off:
Despite their public bravado, some Labor MPs are looking at the latest polls, looking at their electoral margins, and wondering if their Canberra days are numbered. In some small circles there is actually quiet talk of this Labor Government being a oncer…

It’s been a terrible start for Kevin Rudd in this election year.... But just remember, John Howard had a shaky first term, too....

What saved him from the ignominy of first-term defeat? A conviction politician, John Howard went on the front foot with tax reform, announcing plans to introduce the GST. Suddenly his body language changed and the Coalition’s support base galvanised....

So is there a lesson here for a faltering Kevin Rudd?
Well, there could be, if Rudd were a conviction politician. But conviction is still the one thing he can’t even fake. - Bolt seems desperate to have something to hold onto. - ed.
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Flannery flunks again
Andrew Bolt
Three years on, the Alarmist of the Year’s analysis is seeming very tatty:
June 25, 2007

Ten predictions about climate change that have come true

Here are the hard facts about global warming that everyone should know, compiled for Times Online by internationally acclaimed writer, scientist and explorer Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers: Our changing climate and what it means for life on earth

The ten biggest changes to the weather wrought by climate change

1) Shorter winters

2) Less runoff into dams and reservoirs in many regions of the world

3) More violent and longer hurricanes

4) Less chilly nights

5) Less predictable seasonal conditions

6) Less snow

7) More heat waves

8) Less rain in many regions at various seasons

9) More severe storms in the North Sea and parts of the southern Ocean

10) Generally warmer conditions
Rains now flood parts of Australia, and the snow has rarely been deeper:
According to Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, last week’s Northern Hemisphere winter snow extent was the second highest on record, at 52,166,840 km2.
Hurricane activity is at a low, and record low temperatures are being set at many places in the US.

Other than that, some of the rest of Flannery’s claims might seem half-plausible.

(Thanks to reader Craig.)
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Abbott talks sex. Can Rudd too?
Andrew Bolt
Too much information, but Abbott means to sabotage Labor’s Mad Monk smear:
OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has spoken about his sex life, describing sex as one of life’s great pleasures.

Mr Abbott says he eschews a “hair shirt” view of the good things in life. Although, he says, it’s difficult for him to have sex sometimes.

“Let’s face it, it’s almost impossible to have when you are on the campaign trail,” Mr Abbott told Launceston’s The Examiner newspaper.
This conversation is also too dangerous for Rudd to join in. Another benefit, designed to cast the battle as between a “real” bloke and a fake.
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A whale of a coincidence
Andrew Bolt
Hey, isn’t that around the time of the next election?
KEVIN Rudd today threatened to take legal action against Japan if it does not stop whaling in the Southern Ocean by November this year.
Seems that Rudd, stung by the broken-promises taunts, is prepared to sacrifice our relationship with Japan on the altar of his ambition.
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Tick, tick, tick
Andrew Bolt
Time is running out to stop Iran - before it’s too late:
The United Nations nuclear watchdog said it was worried Iran could be working on “a nuclear payload for a missile”, in its most hard-hitting report on Tehran’s atomic programme…

In a report set to bolster the US’s push for UN sanctions, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it had “broadly consistent and credible” information about activities that could help Tehran develop atomic weapons.

These include work with high explosives, designs that could help a missile carry fissile material and attempts by people linked to Iran’s military to obtain nuclear technology. “Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,” it said.

In a finding that appeared to contradict a Bush-era US intelligence estimate that Iran had suspended work on nuclear weaponisation in 2003, the IAEA report said the activities it described “seem to have continued beyond 2004”.
Not coincidentally:
The language of the report was much more blunt than that used by Mr Amano’s predecessor Egyptian Mohamed ElBaradei, who stepped down as head of the IAEA at the end of November.
It may well turn out that the gravest intelligence error was not to have assumed Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction, but that Iran had stopped working on its own.
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Skips are the real targets
Andrew Bolt
Racist thugs are obviously targetting Australians, and not Indians:
PEOPLE born overseas are less likely to be assaulted than those born in Australia, according to new Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

The national survey found that those born in Australia were more than twice as likely to be the victim of a physical assault.

It showed an assault rate of 3.6 per cent for Australian-born people, or 445,000 victims, compared with an assault rate of 1.7 per cent, or 82,000, for those born in other countries.
If the figures were reversed, the media would be full of screams that racist Australians were picking on foreigners. So what must we conclude now that the facts show it’s the locals who are at most risk of violence, instead?

It really is time to end this ludicrous, deceitful and self-flagellating debate about the motives of the thugs, and focus instead on their violence - and how best to stamp it out.
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Bang, and you’re in
Andrew Bolt
So why were these illegal immigrants - and suspected criminals - given Australian residency by the Rudd Government?
MANY of the asylum seekers aboard a boat that exploded near Ashmore Reef, killing five people, were aware of a plan to set it alight, the Northern Territory Coroner said yesterday.

Greg Cavanagh said he held the reasonable view that a crime was committed on the boat known as SIEV 36 before the explosion and would refer allegations against three Afghan men to authorities for the possible laying of criminal charges…

Summing up evidence at a three-week inquest into the deaths, Stephen Walsh, QC, counsel assisting the coroner, said it was likely that Sabzali Salman, Arman Ali Brahimi and Mohammad Anwar Mohammadi acted in concert to implement a plan that involved a series of deliberate acts to ensure they could not be sent back to Indonesia.
But last October:
ALL surviving asylum-seekers from the boat that exploded off WA in April will be granted permanent residency in Australia. Ahead of a coronial inquest into the cause of the blaze that killed five of their fellow passengers, the 42 Afghan men from the boat that was set alight on April 16 will be released into the community this week...
(Thanks to reader CA.)
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It’s the government’s garbage that’s the real worry
Andrew Bolt
When you hear the word “green”, keep your hand on your wallet:
HOUSEHOLDS face a radical $50 garbage tax under plans to make Victoria a green mecca.

The State Government is quietly surveying voters to gauge how much they would be prepared to pay for greener waste disposal…

The Department of Sustainability and Environment says the project would extract green waste to create compost and renewable energy.
The Government’s green policies have so far helped Melbourne to run short of water and our forests to turn into ash. Now you’ll pay more to supply the fuel for the “green energy” for which you’ll pay more still.

It’s the garbage in Spring St., not in our houses, that now needs composting.

UPDATE

Minister for Garbage Environment and Climate Change Gavin Jennings on radio today says he hasn’t yet got the survey results but already has a feeling that $50 a year is too much “at this time”. You know, in this election year.

How about 20 cents a week, he suggests.

Which means that one more thing that needs composting is the useless survey he’s commissioned.

UPDATE 2

A talkback caller who completed the survey says he was asked how he felt about a garbage tax set at between $50 and $150 a year. No cheaper option was offered.

And now the Government, even before it sees the results, says it’s actually thinking of $10 a year instead. That’s one fast backpedal.
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The merchant of death
Andrew Bolt

FOR 15 years, the growing pile of the dead at Dr Philip Nitschke’s feet should have warned us of a great moral crime.

Yet Australia’s leading euthanasia activist has been free to strike again.

The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine this week found 51 Australians had died in the past decade from overdoses of Nembutal, promoted by Nitschke as the “peaceful pill”.

Of the 38 cases thoroughly checked by a coroner, only 11 were of people who’d suffered serious pain or illness.

Even sadder, eight of the dead were in their thirties, and six younger still.

Nitschke has for years promoted Nembutal, illegal here for human consumption, and has suggested how best to get it from Mexico.

He says he’s tried to restrict his advice to the elderly, but even now shrugs: “There will be some casualties.”

But, oh, the casualties since he launched his evangelical campaign.

I was once inclined to be sympathetic, since my own cancer-riddled mother made me and others of my family help her to try to die.

But Nitschke has since shown me how easily euthanasia becomes the cold substitute for the more loving care that the depressed truly want - and a too-easy removal of a problem for the living.

I first checked on him in 1996, when the Northern Territory briefly had laws permitting euthanasia. He was then the doctor of seven people who had applied for permission to die.

You’d have sworn they were in great pain or days from death, but I later read the truth in Nitschke’s own account in an article he co-wrote for The Lancet.
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And the joke is they already had insulation anyway
Andrew Bolt – Friday, February 19, 10 (06:34 am)

A typical Rudd policy in action:

A MELBOURNE couple thought their house would be destroyed after insulation installed by “cowboy operators” caught fire…

The couple, who didn’t want to be identified out of fear, said a door-to-door salesman approached them in late January offering to replace the blow-in insulation with batts under the Federal Government’s rebate scheme, which has come under fire after four insulation installers died at work.

The husband said the batts were too short and placed on top of the original insulation. He ventured into the roof after his 11-year-old daughter smelled smoke on February 6.

“It was filled with smoke and I couldn’t see what I was doing so I got down the ladder and rang the fireys, thinking my house was going to go up,” he said… “The Government has introduced cowboys and they have put our lives on the line.”

To sum up, This is a free-money, help-yourself, no questions asked boondoggle which in this case results in:

- cowboys let loose in someone’s house

- insulation installed in a house that already some

- the house set on fire

And no minister loses their job over such a scandalous waste of lives, property and money? I’m simply gobsmacked. Is it that this farce is too epic in scale for anyone to take it all in?

UPDATE

Reader Aquarian corrects me:

They were not “cowboys”, they are Indians.

Reader Eskimo confirms the waste:

I was cold called last night by a company offering to install insulation in my home for free. When I indicated I already had insulation, the caller said they would install the additional insulation over the top.

UPDATE 2

Reader Brendan claims he has evidence of another scam:

I have recently seen, photographed, filmed and reported a house in which there is a growing mountain of used insulation bats in the back and front yard. Attempts by the owners to conceal it have failed. The house belongs to several Indian students who are running an Insulation scam by removing insulation from houses rented by other Indian and non-Indian co-operators and installing Insulation bats. After inspection are then also removed and installed in the next job and then the process is repeated. This practice is widespread and has already recouped millions of dollars for the scammers.
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And the joke is they already had insulation anyway
Andrew Bolt
A typical Rudd policy in action:
A MELBOURNE couple thought their house would be destroyed after insulation installed by “cowboy operators” caught fire…

The couple, who didn’t want to be identified out of fear, said a door-to-door salesman approached them in late January offering to replace the blow-in insulation with batts under the Federal Government’s rebate scheme, which has come under fire after four insulation installers died at work.

The husband said the batts were too short and placed on top of the original insulation. He ventured into the roof after his 11-year-old daughter smelled smoke on February 6.

“It was filled with smoke and I couldn’t see what I was doing so I got down the ladder and rang the fireys, thinking my house was going to go up,” he said… “The Government has introduced cowboys and they have put our lives on the line.”
To sum up, This is a free-money, help-yourself, no questions asked boondoggle which in this case results in:
- cowboys let loose in someone’s house

- insulation installed in a house that already some

- the house set on fire
And no minister loses their job over such a scandalous waste of lives, property and money? I’m simply gobsmacked. Is it that this farce is too epic in scale for anyone to take it all in?

UPDATE

Reader Aquarian corrects me:
They were not “cowboys”, they are Indians.
Reader Eskimo confirms the waste:
I was cold called last night by a company offering to install insulation in my home for free. When I indicated I already had insulation, the caller said they would install the additional insulation over the top.
UPDATE 2

Reader Brendan claims he has evidence of another scam:

I have recently seen, photographed, filmed and reported a house in which there is a growing mountain of used insulation bats in the back and front yard. Attempts by the owners to conceal it have failed. The house belongs to several Indian students who are running an Insulation scam by removing insulation from houses rented by other Indian and non-Indian co-operators and installing Insulation bats. After inspection are then also removed and installed in the next job and then the process is repeated. This practice is widespread and has already recouped millions of dollars for the scammers.
===
No proper way to spend on people who don’t exist
Andrew Bolt
BUT of course someone in Stolen Generations Victoria blew almost $100,000 in “inappropriate spending”.

The question is why the Brumby Government is so surprised that it’s now dumped the SGV board, frozen its $330,000 a year in funding and called in the police.

You see, this outfit had to spend our cash “inappropriately” if it were to spend it at all. And for that you must blame this Government entirely.

The farcical history of the SGV dates from 2003, when the Government got a report from the Stolen Generations Taskforce it had set up under Aboriginal leadership and with “stolen generations” propagandist Prof Robert Manne on its board.

The taskforce actually had good news: not only did it conclude that “Victoria had no formal policy for removing children” just for being black, nor could it find a single Victorian who was a victim of such a policy.

The closest examples of the “stolen generations” it had tracked down were just children who’d been saved from harm, abandoned or raised by grandparents who lived white. Oh, and one man claimed he’d been “stolen” because his parents had sent him to a boarding school, causing him to lose touch with his Aboriginal side.

Yet despite this failure to find any stolen children, and despite the existence already of 36 organisations in Victoria to help any who might one day turn up, the Government decided this report proved we needed a 37th.

So it set up SGV with about $1 million every three years to help all these people no one could find.

What else did you expect, then, but that this money would be spent “inappropriately”, given there’s no one to spend it appropriately on?
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Did green faith turn a fire into an inferno?
Andrew Bolt
ONLY now is this royal commission getting close to the true scandal behind the devastating Black Saturday fires.

It’s this: why did this Labor Government ignore so many warnings that it was burning too little of our forests?

Did its green agenda cripple the most effective technique it had to keep our bush towns safe - to burn off the fuel loads that turn a fire into an inferno?

A year after Black Saturday, the royal commission this week finally heard

its first witness on the fuel reduction burns done before Black Saturday. Or not done.

And the answers given by Liam Fogarty, assistant fire chief of the Department of Sustainability and the Environment, reinforced my suspicions.

Fogarty confirmed that over the past three years his department had burned off the excess fuel load from just 150,000ha a year. He said it should really have burned nearly twice that much, and in the early 1980s had burned up to three times more.

So why so little, when even Fogarty said a burned buffer around a town such as Anglesea could cut the fire risk to properties by 80 per cent?

Fogarty blamed a lack of resources, saying his department was “pretty well running at capacity”, and there’d actually been “some reduction in organisational capacity and focus” since the mid-1990s.

But, as you know, where there’s a will there’s always a way to find the staff and cash. Trouble is, since this Labor Government was elected in 1999, that will has gone missing.

Fogarty did not put it like that, of course. He simply said there had been a distinct drop in controlled burning in Victoria over the past 15 years or so, thanks to an “anti-forestry and anti-fire management movement”.
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The Wong who cried wolf
Andrew Bolt
A bit of consumer resistance to the latest frantic scare-mongering of Penny Wong:
AUSTRALIA’S most iconic beaches, including Bondi, Bells and those on the Sunshine Coast, could erode away or recede by hundreds of metres over the coming century, according to Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.

But locals aren’t so sure.

Bondi veteran Lee Boman has swum at the beach for more than 30 years and was adamant he had seen “no change” to the coastline over that period. “Nothing too drastic that indicates it is going to be changed in the future,” said Mr Boman, 53…

Patrick Doab, 63, said he had been visiting Bondi nearly every Sunday since the 1960s and was not worried anything would change.
But what would the locals know? They’ve only stared at Bondi with their own two eyes for more than 30 years, but Wong has seen the models.

One question, though. Say Wong’s alarmist warning of a possible 1 metre rise in sea levels by 2100 turns out true, is it really conceivable that Bondi’s foreshore and its houses will be simply allowed to slide into the sea? Isn’t it just remotely possible that the sea wall will be just built a little higher?

UPDATE

Wong is an IPCC dupe, says Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

(Thanks to reader MarkH.)

UPDATE 2

Wong is wrong not just on the IPCC’s use of dodgy data on insurance losses, as Pielke notes. She’s also wrong to claim the IPCC did not exaggerate with its wild claim that 40 per cent of the Amazon forests could be destroyed by a small fall in rainfall, thanks to global warming:
Last month, there were claims that a statement in the IPCC’s Assessment is unfounded due to reliance on a World Wildlife Fund report. The statement suggested that 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation.

The fact is that the issues highlighted in the WWF report were drawn from peer-reviewed research published in the respected journal Nature in 1999. The author of that peer-reviewed work has confirmed that the IPCC’s statement is correct. While it’s true that the IPCC should have better referenced this work – this criticism hardly undermines the findings itself.
False. EUReferendum explains the IPCC “mistake”:
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Tell it like it isn’t
Andrew Bolt

Reader Miles says NRL star Sam Thaiday was let down by not just his tattooist:
Why did The Weekend Australian choose to take a large format 23cm x 23 cm photograph of Sam Thaiaday, Yam Island’s most famous son, and a feature player in the ‘Indigenous All Stars’ match, with a tattoo featuring a glaring spelling mistake on his imposing chest? “One Brother Bleeds All Brother’s Bleed”?

It may just be an errant apostrophe but it’s Sam that has to live with this. The Weekend Australian conveniently chose to write the correct version on two occasions in its editorial, but still depicts his bare chest with the incorrect and sadly in-correctable version.
I’d have thought the more interesting and glaring media flaw was to cover up Thaiday’s tattoo.
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Too hopeless to sack under Rudd’s new laws
Andrew Bolt
Which means the more unemployable your employee, the harder it now is to sack him:
THE nation’s industrial umpire has ruled that a long-term employee who was legitimately sacked for repeated safety breaches must be reinstated and paid compensation because of his poor education and poor job prospects.

In the latest ruling to concern business, Fair Work Australia found the worker had engaged in “relatively serious misconduct”, but ruled the sacking harsh due to his length of service and the fact he was a poorly educated middle-aged family man…

During a shutdown at Norske Skog Paper Mills in Albury last September, Paul Quinlivan and a colleague were cleaning out a tank that captured staples from recycled pulp, when he repeatedly removed his safety glasses and was told four times by a manager to put them back on.

The tribunal accepted that his repeated failure to wear the safety glasses and his disdainful and abusive response to management amounted to serious misconduct…

But the tribunal said the sacking was a “disaster” for Mr Quinlivan, taking into account that he had worked at the mill for 20 years, was married with two daughters, aged nine and 11, and had a mortgage of about $70,000. It also considered that Mr Quinlivan left school at 16, did not complete secondary school and had not found another job.

“If the applicant had substantially lesser service; had not been a middle-aged man with very poor employment prospects for whom the dismissal has such serious personal and economic consequences; or if it had been brought home to him at any time on 2 September, 2009, that a further breach would have serious consequences, I would not have concluded that the dismissal was harsh,” vice-president Michael Lawler found.
UPDATE

The confrontation, as described in the Fair Work Australia judgement (caution: bad language):
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Warmist predictions washed out
Andrew Bolt
From Tim Blair, who has the links and more:

The Guardian, February, 2009:
The world’s pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.

In an update on the latest science on climate change, the US Congress was told that melting snow pack could lead to severe drought from California to Oklahoma. In the midwest, diminishing rains and shrinking rivers were lowering water levels in the Great Lakes, even to the extent where it could affect shipping.

“With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the south-west is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle,” said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science...
ABC News (US), February, 2010:
In the span of just a couple years, the U.S. has gone from very high drought conditions to the lowest amount of drought in the last 10 years, [Doug LeCompte of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association] says. “It’s only a few times, really, in the last century that we’ve had this little of the country in drought. That is unusual.”
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Rudd foiled again
Andrew Bolt
Yet another of those boats that tough-talking Kevin Rudd was going to stop:
Another boat carrying asylum seekers has been intercepted off Australia’s north coast. The boat carrying 41 passengers and four crew was found north-west of Ashmore Islands…

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison says the number of asylum seekers arriving in Australia is out of control.

“This year in 2010 we’ve had 13 boats arrive, we’ve had more than 700 people arrive on those boats in just seven weeks,” he said.

“This is an extraordinary level of arrivals for a new year. In this period of time it took six months last year to have that many people arrive...”
Maybe he should threaten to send Peter Garrett to install foil insulation in any boat caught in Australian waters. Or is that too cruel?

UPDATE

Promising like a dream, delivering like a nightmare:
KEVIN Rudd’s 2007 election vow to parents to “end the double-drop-off” by building 260 childcare centres at schools is in tatters, with only three completed after two years in office.

The government has conceded that no more than 38 centres will be completed by the end of this year and it cannot say yet when the remaining 222 will be ready…

Last week, a Senate estimates committee heard that despite the government promising to build trades training centres in each of the nation’s 2650 high schools, only one was operational, serving just 180 students.

The Australian revealed in December the government had delivered only only one of a promised 31 GP super clinics, which were designed to provide one-stop-shop services including allied-health experts and diagnostic facilities.
UPDATE 2

And the Government’s pro-union changes to workplace laws aren’t turning out that well, either:
JAPANESE business leaders have warned Australia that a fresh wave of union militancy threatens supply of crucial resources and billion-dollar investments.

The intervention from Australia’s biggest export market is a sign foreign investors are getting nervous about what they see as growing union lawlessness in core industries.

Nippon Steel’s Australian boss, Yoshifumi Nakata, said his company wanted assurances Australia would not return to the industrial days of the 1970s when Japan was forced to look to Brazil for key supplies.
UPDATE 3

A nervous government looks for a better excuse to rush to the polls before it all gets worse:
CLIMATE change has slid down the order of election priorities with the government to dedicate next week in Parliament to gaining a double dissolution trigger on health.

Parliament resumes next week and the government has made its top Senate priority debate on the bill to means test the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate. The measure, worth $1.9 billion to revenue over the next three years, was blocked by the Senate in September. The opposition has vowed to block it again next week, which would make it a trigger for a double dissolution…

A senior source said the government was seeking a trigger based on health, especially as next month the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will unveil his plan for public health reform, which he plans to be an election centrepiece.
(Thanks to readers CA and Pira.)
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It must be MSNB-KKK
Andrew Bolt

Remember Keith Olbermann’s attempt on MSNBC to smear the tea party rallies against Barack Obama as some kind of all-white racist lynch mob?
Where are the black faces?
So what do we conclude about the endemic racism of MSNBC itself?

(Via Instapundit.)
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Bye bye de Boer
Andrew Bolt
Interesting:
YVO de Boer, the top UN climate change official, announced last night that he was resigning after a tumultuous four years in the job, marked by the failure to convince governments to agree on a post-Kyoto deal and revelations of a series of blunders in the UN’s 2007 report on climate change.

His departure as head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change takes effect on July 1, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases.
I suspect de Boer thinks that’s one triumph he needn’t bother staying on for in the hope of witnessing.

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