Headlines Monday 15th February 2010

=== Todays Toon ===
The Stereotyping of the Irish Immigrant in 19th Century Periodicals
by Christine Haug
=== Bible Quest ===
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”- John 13:34-35
===

A U.S. Air Force Nurse comforts a wounded Canadian soldier in Afghanistan as offensive against Taliban rages on

VPs in War of Words
Biden fires back at Cheney over criticism of Obama's fight against terror, saying the ex-VP is trying to 'rewrite history'

Fate of Iran Sanctions Depend on China
As U.S. works to shore up support for tougher stand against Iran's nuke program, major holdout changes tune

Is Climate Change Plan Just Hot Air?
Critics rip White House for plan to boost funding for global warming research amid Climate-gate scandals


Outspoken fool Pauline Hanson is leaving for a new life, claiming Australia is no longer the land of opportunity, but there are things she'll miss

Desperate mum chases kidnapper
WOMAN dragged down a street after trying to grab hold of a vehicle containing her young daughter.

Girlfriend tells of insulation tragedy
A WOMAN'S horrific burns and four deaths, but no Peter Garrett at crucial meeting.

Wild brawl leads to a DIY police force
A LOCAL council fed up with too much crime and too few police is set to create its own police force.

School teacher replaced by a website
FURIOUS parents of year 12 students discover their kids are being taught by a computer.

Burger chain admits screening fatty ads
HUNGRY Jacks says it screened ads for high fat food for children for "business reasons".

Unions to unveil Abbott vendetta
AUSTRALIA'S richest unions will unleash a ferocious assault to combat Tony Abbott's rising star.

Network backtracks over 'Premier's affair'

THE Seven Network has settled a defamation case brought by South Australian Premier Mike Rann over his alleged involvement with a former parliamentary waitress. But the network did not retract the suggestion that the alleged affair took place, and has stressed the statement is not an apology. - be responsible and do not vote ALP in the upcoming election. Rann has acted apparently corruptly and has attempted to bring ridiculous laws into being to prevent his apparent corruption from being further exposed. - ed.
=== Comments ===
10 Thoughts On Meaningful Relationships
By Rev. Bill Shuler
The most basic of all human needs is the need to love and be loved.
From the beginning of time we have known that it is not good for man to be alone. The most basic of all human needs is the need to love and be loved. Yet, our mobile lifestyles create shallow roots resulting in 70% of Americans claiming to have many acquaintances but few close friends. The following are 10 thoughts on why we need meaningful relationships:

1. Mother Teresa: “Loneliness is the leprosy of modern society.”
2. 4 out of 10 admit to frequent feelings of loneliness. (Gallup)
3. The absence of relationships results in absence of affirmation, shared experience and disclosure.
4. A life unshared is only half lived.
5. Nothing so shapes us as the relationships we have in life.
6. The average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime. (U.S. Census Bureau)
7. Ecclesssiastes 4:9 “Two are better than one.”
8. Self-absorption leaves little room for quality relationships.
9. The intimate family relationships that nurtured us in our early years are rarely replaced once the family unit disperses.
10. Social networks alone will not create the trust and shared experiences of face-to-face friendships.

Never has there been so great a need for meaningful relationships. In a fast-paced, high-tech, highly mobile society we must be intentional in cultivating connectedness and community. The joy of living well is found in stepping beyond our independence and isolation towards a quality of life only to be found with others.
===
RULED BRITANNIA
Tim Blair
In Britain, rules are rules:

A girl fighting for her life after a car she was travelling in plunged into an ice-cold river was not rescued for almost two hours because health and safety rules prevented police from entering the water.

Instead, her rescue had to wait until a specialist diving team arrived. From the next county. This took 97 minutes. The girl, only five years old, has since died.
===
DOUG FIEGER
Tim Blair
Doug Fieger, lead singer of 70s band The Knack, has died at 57.
===
LOVE RECORD BROKEN
Tim Blair
The Age‘s Adam Morton keeps the panic alive:

It largely went unreported, but January was the hottest on record.

On record, you say? And how long might that be, exactly? For clarification, we turn to newly-interesting Phil Jones, who tells the BBC:

… that the satellite record from the University of Alabama in Huntsville showed it had been the warmest January since records began in 1979.

In other words, we’ve just had the hottest January in Jennifer Love Hewitt’s lifetime. The planet is doomed and we will all be killed.
===
SCEPTICISM STREETS THE FIELD
Tim Blair
Running at Naracoorte yesterday, the beautifully-named Globalwarmnsceptic won by six lengths in her first-ever start:

Reports Jack Lacton, this site’s senior turf analyst: “Your humble correspondent had a lazy $50 on, picking up $415 and, in the process, making more money by investing in global warming scepticism than has been made from the tens of billions invested so far in so-called clean technologies.”
===
LIMIT OF DISASTER: DAYTONA 2010
Tim Blair
Driving the only Toyota on earth that hasn’t been recalled, and on the only banks in the US that aren’t seeking a federal bailout, Australia’s Marcos Ambrose this morning competes in the 52nd Daytona 500. This should be a memorable race, predicts Lars Anderson:

Because NASCAR has made the holes in the restrictor plates as large as they’ve been since 1989, speeds will be up on Sunday. Forty cars, after all, were faster in qualifying than the pole winner was last year. And because NASCAR has relaxed its rules on bump-drafting – drivers can now slam into the rear of another car wherever they please, not just in the straightaways, which was the only place they could attempt this dicey maneuver last year – the race could very well feature more banging and paint trading (and hence more wrecks) than any in recent memory.

Which might play to Ambrose’s traffic-brawling strengths. Further from Mike Hembree:

This will be the first point race of the “have at it, boys” era of Sprint Cup racing … Carl Edwards said his Thursday qualifying race produced drivers racing “right to the edge … I think there’s only a certain limit you’ll see everybody go to. That’s right at the limit of disaster, and that’s where we’ll race.”

It’s where racing should be. Coverage begins here shortly.
===
VIEWERS, HOWEVER, MAY OBJECT
Tim Blair
If it will make my future co-host Sarah Murdoch feel less insecure, I am prepared to work without make-up.
===
TREE TOLD
Tim Blair
An attentive audience hears the latest on global warming’s planet-wide menace:

Global warming and climate change affects all countries, rich and poor alike, and are more dangerous than even terrorism, which targets only specific countries, according to D.R. Karthikeyan, former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation.

In the last century, forests had been indiscriminately targeted for narrow gains and this had also contributed greatly to this global problem.

Mr. Karthikeyan was addressing a sapling …

That edit may be slightly misleading. Meanwhile:
A man who put cheese down his trousers faces a life sentence when he goes before a judge next month.
===
STEADILY ON THE WANE
Tim Blair
A Valentine’s Day prediction from the New York Times:

The old custom of sending samples of affection to adorable young ladies in care of the postman is apparently losing ground very fast, if it can be judged by the appearance of the mail in the New York Post Office.

Eight or 10 years ago, even, the traffic was much larger than it has since been, and last night, when all the City mail was in, there were so few valentines in the office that they could be counted by hundreds, while large packages, boxes, bundles, and rolls, was not more than a hundred all told ...

Enough has been seen to show that, as compared with other years, the old-fashioned custom has lost popularity, and is steadily on the wane.

But enough about the Times and its circulation problems. Things have changed since 1877; we now celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching an Australian drive a rose-decorated Toyota in Florida.
===
Kochie, tell that one next time to Kevvie
Andrew Bolt
We’ve heard David Koch on Channel 7’s Rudd-promoting Sunrise tell his ”joke” about John Howard. Is this one about Tiger Woods and the Virgin Mary even more offensive?

Seems to me Sunrise is looking to shrink its audience into a small but almost still fashionable Rudd-loving, warmining worrying, Catholic-baiting demographic.

(Thanks to reader Ganesh. Declaration: I appear most Mondays on Channel 9’s Today.)
===
Better 100 lose their jobs than one lose his “rights”
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government seems to think it’s better for workers to have “rights” than a job. We last week had this;

WORKPLACE Relations Minister Julia Gillard yesterday boasted workers were better off under Labor despite the sacking of six teenagers because the government’s new laws won’t let them work shifts under three hours. Ms Gillard said that under the Fair Work Act, workers would not be disadvantaged since their take-home pay was guaranteed and they had improved rights.

And now newsagent Mark Fletcher says newsagencies are also being forced to sack students doing after-hours work:

Students are a valuable labour force for newsagents. Newsagencies have been a valuable learning and income opportunity for students. The Fair Work Act is changing that thanks to the minimum hours provisions.

Consider the case of “Nick”. For three years he has worked three nights a week, after school, for between and hour and a half and two hours. The newsagency was on the way home. He was happy with the work and the award wage he was paid. Now, under the new provisions, he will have to be let go since he cannot be given the minimum hours as the business closes at 6pm and he cannot get there before 4:15pm.

This story is not unique. I have heard from at least twenty-five newsagents of with similar stories, especially in high-street and regional situations. I’d estimate that more than two-thirds of newsagencies employ students for short hours. While it is hard to give a number of students affected without surveying all newsagents, I’d estimate that more than 15,000 students would be affected.

(Thanks to reader Brett.)
===
How the IPCC made Africa starve
Andrew Bolt
Christopher Booker discovers yet another scandal in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on which Kevin Rudd bases his global warming policies. And this one directly implicates the IPCC chairman:

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the (IPCC’s) main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent…

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for “carbon credits”. As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, “agricultural production will more than double by 2020”. Yet it was Agoumi’s claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC’s Working Group II report in 2007.

What made this even odder, however, was that the group’s co-chairman was a British agricultural expert, Dr Martin Parry, whose consultancy group, Martin Parry Associates, had been paid £75,000 by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for two reports which had come to totally different conclusions. Specifically designed to inform the IPCC’s 2007 report, these predicted that by 2020 any changes were likely to be insignificant. The worst case they could come up with was that by 2080 climate change might decrease crop yields by “up to 30 per cent"…

Yet when it came to the impact on Africa, all this peer-reviewed work – including further expert reports by Britain’s Dr Mike Hulme and Dutch and German teams – was ignored in favour of a prediction from one Moroccan activist at odds with his own cited sources.

However, the story then got worse when Dr Pachauri himself came to edit and co-author the IPCC’s Synthesis Report (for which the IPCC paid his Delhi-based Teri institute...). Not only did Pachauri’s version again give prominence to Agoumi’s 50 per cent figure, but he himself has repeated the claim on numerous occasions since...

A gigantic fraud is unravelling - and less than three years after the IPCC shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for frightening billions of people rigid.

And what does Rudd keep telling us about the now deeply suspect IPCC and its even more deeply compromised chairman?

The first thing I’d say is the IPCC - International Panel on Climate Change - scientists has 4000 (sic) essentially humourless scientists in white coats who go around and measure things...

(Thanks to Kent and other readers.)
===
$43 billion for yesterday’s technology tomorrow
Andrew Bolt
The rush-rush-Rudd Government’s rushed decision to splurge $43 billion on national broadband network - without even a proper cost-benefit analysis - is looking dodgier by the day:

The day before Telstra coughed up its dismal interim profit result last week, Google announced that it was planning to go into the broadband business in the US, and would offer fibre speeds of one gigabit per second.

In a statement headed “Thinking big with a gig” the world’s richest internet company said it would offer ultra-fast broadband “at a competitive price” to up to 500,000 customers.

Australia’s whizz-bang 100 megabits a second NBN, one-tenth of that speed, looks like a steam locomotive next to Google’s bullet train.

UPDATE

But one aspect of Rudd’s NBN scheme at least is state-of-the-art:

Employees of the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network scheme – including controversial executive, Mike Kaiser - will work from “sky rise” offices in one of a handful of luxury skyscrapers defined by the Property Council of Australia to be of a “Premium” quality (or amongst the best in the country).

NBN Co has leased 3000 square metres over two levels, near the distinctive pitched peak of the Melbourne Central office building at 360 Elizabeth Street, paying a speculated rent of over $500 per square metre, per annum, gross (which means including outgoings). Most CBD office staff work in B+ grade office accommodation, which typically rents for about $350 per square metre, per annum, CBD leasing sources say.

(Thanks to readers Jon and Robert.)
===
More of that water this green Government swore wouldn’t flow
Andrew Bolt
Remember the Victorian Labor Government’s excuse for not building a dam on the Mitchell - a dam which would have given us three times more water than the Government’s planned desalination plant, and for just a third of the cost?

Yes, it was our old friend “climate change”, which would allegedly dry up the rains, claimed Melbourne Water:

Climate change—while the Mitchell has flooded recently, investing billions of dollars in another rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky.

I assume Melbourne Water was referrring there to the biggest of the two floods in 2007, during which more water flowed to waste in the sea than Melbourne drinks in a year.

But since then the river catchment keeps getting enough rain for periodic flood warnings, including this today:

Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
Victoria

Flood Watch for East Gippsland
[Mitchell, Tambo, Snowy, Cann and Genoa Catchments]

The dam-phobic people who blew $2 billion extra on a power-hungry desal plant to get just a third of the water from a Mitchell dam should be fired.

(Thanks to reader Andrew.)
===
Arthur Tanner and Martha Rudd
Andrew Bolt
On the left of page 1 of today’s Financial Review:

Tanner vows new assault on red tape

Federal Finance and Deregulation Minister Lindsay Tanner plans to streamline processes for assessing new regulation as business leaders warn some of the reforms aimed at slashing red tape have stalled.

On the top of page 1 of today’s Financial Review:

Family friendly rules for business

The Rudd government is considering placing tougher requirements on businesses to disclose the number of women they employ and blocking firms from industry assistance or bidding for government contracts if they fail to meet family friendly workplace standards

A perfect illustration of this Government’s astonishing propensity to spin one thing and deliver another.

(Thanks to reader Tim.)
===
Rudd crashes in Queensland
Andrew Bolt
It seems Kevin Rudd is a prophet without honor in his own country:

SUPPORT for Kevin Rudd in his home state has crashed as Tony Abbott’s new-look Coalition powers ahead of Labor for the first time since the 2007 federal election.

The latest Galaxy poll… (shows) support for federal Labor has slipped three percentage points to 39 per cent, while the Coalition has stormed ahead six since November to 46 per cent.

It means the Prime Minister now faces a real contest in his own back yard, as more Queenslanders question whether he can deliver on his promises and whether he is too arrogant.

If preferences were allocated as per the last election, the Coalition would lead on 51 per cent to the ALP’s 49 per cent.

Extraordinary. And remember: the Liberals’ resurgence started when it finally dared to oppose Rudd’s insane emissions trading scheme - a move that the leading Canberra press pack oracles insisted would kill the party stone dead.

This, I’m sure, will be a key Liberal attack-theme at the election:

But worrying for Mr Rudd is that 49 per cent of Queenslanders now believe he is “more talk than action” ...

And on that theme, the once-timid Business Council of Australia today delivered this polite request - which is actually underpinned by a devastating assessment of Rudd’s inability to match his grand rush-rush plans with thoughtful delivery - and a strategy to pay for them all:
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Would you settle for a typewriter for every student, instead?
Andrew Bolt

I thought computers were overrated as a teaching aid even before this latest stumble of the rush-rush-Rudd Government:

THEY were called the toolbox of the 21st century by Kevin Rudd in the 2007 election campaign as Labor launched its $1 billion digital education revolution.

Two and a half years on, students have been lumbered with “glorified typewriters” as the Government drags the chain on high-speed internet access in high schools.

Yesterday it was confirmed none of the $100 million budgeted to bring high-speed broadband to schools had been spent after more than two years of Labor in power.
===
Good to be gay
Andrew Bolt
“Gay” makes all the difference, notes Andrew Norton:

A CBS poll on gays in the US military finds that the American public is much happier with the idea of ‘gay men and lesbians’ serving in the military than ‘homosexuals’ serving in the military. For the ‘strongly favour’, ‘gay men and lesbians’ adds 17 percentage points to the total.

CBS finds 34 per cent of Americans strongly favor “homosexuals” serving in the military, but 51 per cent strongly favor “gay men and lesbians” joining up.
===
Not unusual, not the hottest, not still warming
Andrew Bolt
Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia climate scientist at the centre of the Climategate scandal, concedes to the BBC we’ve had warming bursts just like the last one that the IPCC claims was probably man-made:

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?...

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

He agrees that any warming since 1995 is “statistically insignificant”:

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Jones also agrees there has been cooling since January 2002, but insists it’s statistically insignificant because the period is too short:

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

And he is prepared to agree at least that even he’s not yet sure that it’s warmer now than it was in the Medieval Warm Period (which the IPCC pooh-poohed):

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

So the recent rate of warming isn’t unprecedented when likened to recent warming periods that are not blamed on man. There has been no statistically significant warming for 15 years, and even cooling since January 2002. The world may, even in Jones’ view, still be cooler now than it was 1000 years ago,

And these facts, agreed to now by one of the scientists most responsible for the man-made warming theory, is behind the greatest mass panic in modern history.

Feel you’ve been had?

Here’s how Jones still justifies his belief that man is warming the world dangerously:
===
And that’s actually what is meant to be his strength
Andrew Bolt
Age diplomatic editor Daniel Flitton checks the scorecard of the Prime Minister whose greatest expertise was in foreign affairs:

Let’s run through a quick list.

Relations with India? Stuffed.

China? Edgy and hostile.

Indonesia? Tense.

Japan? Sour.

Fiji? Suva kicked out our high commissioner.

Not a great record, you’d have to say.

But Flitton argues that “the broader strategic context is important”, and tries to give some to make Rudd’s record seem less, well, terrible.

But I must say that what Lee Kuan Yew, the power behind Singapore’s throne, says of Rudd in not-so-private is close to unprintable.
===
Are police less feared?
Andrew Bolt
Has there been a shift to greater defiance of the police?

Melbourne, Saturday:

Two Melbourne teenagers are expected to be charged after a beer bottle smashed the windscreen of a police van called to a wild party.

The youths were part of a group brawling in the street outside an out-of-control party in Melbourne’s far southern suburbs about 10.40pm (AEDT) on Saturday.

When police arrived a beer stubby was thrown at them, smashing the van’s windscreen…

Police shut down the party in Skye, near Frankston, and sent 200 partygoers on their way.

Yamba, NSW, Sunday:

Two officers sustained minor injuries when a group of up to 20 people - including a 16-year-old girl - set upon them with bricks after they were called to an out-of-control party at an industrial complex in Yamba at around 2.30am (AEDT) on Sunday…

After the officers retreated on foot, their vehicle was set alight, along with another car, thought to belong to a party-goer.

Det Insp Clarke said police reinforcements arrived at the complex at about 4am (AEDT) and arrested 13 people. A second patrol car was damaged at that time, causing a total of $50,000 in damage, police said.
===
England is being swamped by another immigrant
Andrew Bolt
Hanson will hope the UK is more welcoming of immigrants than she’s been:

ANTI-immigration mouthpiece Pauline Hanson is packing up her bags and emigrating. She is departing for a new life in the UK, claiming that Australia is no longer the land of opportunity.
===
Police fail; Frankston hires the Magnificent Eight
Andrew Bolt

How woeful is Victoria’s policing now?

So concerned is the Frankston City Council by a rise in crime - and, more particularly by the apparent inability of the Brumby Government to get more police to make patrols - that tonight it is expected to pass a motion committing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a six-month trial aimed at making its streets safer.

As many as eight security personnel will be regularly patrolling the suburb’s train stations and foreshore, as well as maintaining a presence on the streets, in a move that has already won support from within the Victoria Police…

Last year Frankston experienced a 6 per cent increase in assaults and a 12 per cent increase in property damage, yet the police seem resigned to the belief that it is a problem that they alone cannot fix.

Note Victoria Police’s reaction. It brightly offers “support” to the creation of a new policing force by frightened locals who demand the basic kind of protection the police should give, but can’t or won’t:

Mayor Christine Richards said severe police shortages had left the council no option.

Cr Richards said local councils should not have to resort to such measures. “This is a State Government responsibility.

“Our community police do a great job ... but (they) haven’t got enough resources to do foot patrols, so we’re picking up the slack,” she said.

In short, Victoria Police supports what should shame it.
===
Bored with the end of the world
Andrew Bolt

David Marr senses that he’s not the only warmist now bored with what Kevin Rudd billed “the great moral challenge of our generation”:

But Canberra has wearied of climate change. Only the nutters are being listened to now. Fewer than a dozen journalists bothered to join a couple of hundred business folk for Hunt’s headline clash on climate change with Senator Penny Wong at the Press Club.

And he suggests a winning line to Kevin Rudd to really grab the voters’ waning attention:

One line would cut a swathe through the increasingly unlistenable rhetoric of both the government and opposition: whatever measures we take to combat global warming have to hurt. We won’t change without pain.

I can only hope Rudd takes this helpful advice. That should indeed focus attention marvellously, especially when Rudd also comes clean on what that cost will precisely be, and what cooling we’ll achieve in return.