What Rudd will do with his share of the tax.
=== Bible Quote ===
“But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love; for you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble.”- Psalm 59:16
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White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel meets with advocates for the disabled after 'f-ing retarded' comment.
U.S. at Risk for Cyber Attack
National Intelligence director warns U.S. is not up to task of defending 'malicious cyberactivity' that can wreak havoc
Dealing Another Blow to Toyota
Shares of embattled carmaker dive after off-the-cuff remark about not driving them from transportation secretary
$2M Super Bowl Ad — Paid By You
Census bureau spending millions,paid for with taxpayer dollars, to get Americans to answer simple survey
45-Foot Ancient Snake Devoured Crocs
The largest snake the world has ever known likely had a diet that included crocodile, or at least an ancient ...
Penn St. Investigating Scientist Over Research Misconduct
Penn State will move forward with an investigation into a leading climate scientist after an internal inquiry into four possible allegations of research misconduct. A university committee has been looking into the work of meteorology professor Michael Mann since late November, when leaked e-mails were obtained by computer hackers from a British research center. Mann's research has long been a target of criticism by skeptics of man-made global warming theories.
Space Agency to Ignore Space, Study Climate Change
NASA's new proposed budget will shift the space agency's focus from landing people on the moon back to Earth, with more money slated for projects that will help us understand our planet's climate -- and even re-launch the carbon observatory that failed to launch last year. The 2011 proposed budget for NASA, announced on Monday, cancels the Constellation program to build new rockets and spacecraft optimized for the moon, but increases NASA's overall budget by $6 billion over the next five years. Of that $6 billion, about $2 billion will be funneled into new and existing science missions, particularly those aimed at investigating Earth sciences, particularly the climate.
Climate-Gate Scientist Promises to Be More Open
The scientist at the center of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has admitted that he and his colleagues need to be more open with their data. Professor Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia, has been accused of blocking requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act. He said: "We are facing more and more public scrutiny and any future work we do is going to have much greater scrutiny by our peers and by the public. We do need to make more of the data available, I fully accept that." Jones continued, "We need to work differently, making more data available and making our assumptions clear. Everything needs to be more and more open and we will be striving to do that in the future."
Frederick Martens, with wife Rose, was jailed for nearly 1000 days on false child-rape claims and says the AFP wanted to "get the bastard" before their case was exposed.
Darwin blast 'a mini Bali attack'
DOCTOR likens Darwin attack which left many with serious burns to a "small scale Bali bombing".
Coach 'spiked kids' drinks before abuse'
CHILDREN "plied with spiked milkshakes and drug-laced macaroni before being molested"
AFL star faces life ban over drug charges
STAR footballer Mathew Stokes' promising career could be over following drug-dealing charges.
We're all aliens, says British scientist
THE human race began as "microbes brought to Earth by comets millions of years ago".
Macquarie Dictionary reveals top word
A HYPHENATED word has been named Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year for 2009.
Laws urged as dog attack stats revealed
NEW statistics reveal how an alarming number of babies and toddlers are being mauled by dogs.
Teen jailed over 'senseless' bashing
CHEF Daniel Owen never had a chance to hand over his money to two teenage robbers before they viciously bashed him to death outside his home.
Belinda Neal battles as Labor revolts against her
CONTROVERSIAL Federal MP Belinda Neal's own branch members have called on her to resign for "the good of the nation" in an unwanted pre-election headache for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. In another sign Mr Rudd is preparing for a possible early election, rank and file ballots for 14 NSW Federal seats, including the marginal Sydney and Central Coast electorates, have been brought forward to next Monday.
Families feeling groceries pain as prices soar
GROCERY prices have soared with the cost of a standard basket of goods rising by about $10 in three months. Figures released yesterday show families were slugged far more for meat, fruit and vegetables, beer and various other grocery items in the three months to Christmas, compared with the three months to September.
=== Journalists Corner ===
an awesome art show opening this Saturday at the Open Center Gallery in New York. The show will feature fifteen Burmese artists, including a presentation about Burmese art from artist Aung Kyaw Moe, and will display paintings, photography, sculptures, performance and video art and documentary films.
The show opens Saturday, February 6 at 8 pm and runs for four days.
For more about the art show, see its website: http://www.opencenter.org/contemporary-burmese-art-ideas-and-ideals/
Show hours are:
February 6 - 8 pm opening
February 7 - 6:30-9 pm
February 8 - 10 am-6 pm
February 9 - 10 am-5 pm
The New York Open Center is located at 22 E. 30th St., NY, NY 10016
===
The "Sultan of Satire" visits the "King of Cable News!"
What will happen when these TV titans collide?
It's no joke -- Jon Stewart's entering the "No Spin Zone"!
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Your World Exclusive!
Rep. John Boehner calls out Obama's budget strategy. Now, he lays out the GOP alternative for America's economy
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Guest: Dr. Phil
Dispensing straight talk & sound advice for America. Dr. Phil makes a 'Hannity' house call!
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Guest: Sen. John McCain
No holding back! Sen. John McCain talks tough on the president's plans.
=== Comments ===
Mad mullahs believe bad science is gospel
Piers Akerman
GLOBAL warming believer Kevin Rudd has adopted the strategies of radical ayatollahs to push his agenda for a huge new tax on Australians and a global wealth redistribution scheme.
- Any heat experienced in Australia was not record breaking. Further, it was not the cause of any fires. However, the cold in the North has been record breaking, and is the cause of many deaths.mentioned that Europe and North America have just endured a record-breaking deep freezeNor has it been quoted that Australia recently endured a record breaking hot summer and drought.
For the left or the right to use individual seasons to adjudicate temperature is wrong (Sydney endured a record cold snap on 2007, ice on the windows in the inner west) Under this research http://weather.about.com/od/climatechange/a/HottestYears.htm 2006 may be the warmest year on record, though 2998 may pip it.
All I say, Mr Akerman, is that the science isn’t in yet, the early indicators aren’t looking good, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Mr Abbot and Mr Rudd have both launched flawed trading schemes, let’s play it safe either way.
BV of Sydney
It is misleading to refer to weather events and call it climate change, but then you are not a scientist and may not know this, possibly because alleged scientists have been doing this very thing so as to promote their agenda which is nothing to do with science.
Rudd does not believe in global warming, and does not have to. Rudd believes in an enormous pork barrel which this mad tax will become for his party. His agenda has nothing to do with belief as to what will happen to the world in forty years time, but what will line his pockets tomorrow. - ed.
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President Obama's Biggest Gamble
By Bill O'Reilly
All this talk of debt and deficits is deadly boring, but when you strip out all the math and BS, you get down to one very fascinating thing: The president of the United States is rolling the dice on America's future.
Right now, this country owes $13 trillion. We can't pay it back. The interest in December alone was more than $100 billion. $100 billion. About as much as New Zealand's entire economic output for a year.
Adding it up, the USA is paying out hundreds of billions in interest alone every year. That's staggering and dangerous. And Monday we learned that the budget next year, 2011, will add another $1.3 trillion to the national debt.
Really? This is unbelievable. The feds are spending $3.8 trillion in a year, and they can't pay for 35 percent of it. Are you kidding me?
Now President Obama says the budget is an investment in America's future because a lot of the money is going to so-called green projects that will change the way that energy is used, and the economy will rise. The president believes we must transition for future growth, and there is some validity to that.
Also, the massive spending will help rebuild infrastructure that has to be upgraded or bridges will start falling into the water. And then you add the incredible expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with all the War on Terror expense, and what we have is financial chaos.
But the Obama administration doesn't see it that way. It believes it can run up the massive debt and somehow pay for it all down the road, primarily by raising taxes. People like me will soon pay about 50 percent of their income in taxes, and corporations can get hit as well. But corporations can pass the tax expense on to you, and they will.
So in effect, everybody will pay more for nearly everything. Not good when the economy is stagnant.
In addition, the capital gains tax goes up five points to 20 percent. This will inhibit investment in America, another big risk.
As you may know, liberal philosophy holds that the federal government has a responsibility to redistribute income and level the playing field for all Americans, but the truth is we simply can't afford to do it. Not with 320 million people. Sweden can do it. They have nine million. But not us. And we have to fight the world's villains; Sweden does not.
"Talking Points" is afraid that the entire financial system in this country will collapse under the mountain of debt. If that happens, there will be no playing field to level. It's a scenario too frightening to think about.
Simply put, the feds need to stop spending. They need to cut across the board, get out of Iraq as fast as we can and stop the social engineering. But I don't expect President Obama to do any of that with the exception of Iraq.
So there's no question the huge federal spending is the president's biggest gamble. All of our lives will be affected by it.
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NEWSPAPER EYEIST
Tim Blair
Christopher Monckton suffers from Graves’ Disease, which causes unusual protrusion of the eyes. You can imagine the embarrassment and suffering. This is how the online edition of the Age sensitively addresses the issue, on its current front page:
And again when you click on the story. (Here’s a screen grab in case adults subsequently remove the shot.) Now, I’m all for mockery, but this fellow is the victim of a disease, and the Age is determinedly focusing on a primary physical symptom of his illness. (Australia’s media union has ethical objections to this sort of thing, which should interest the host of Media Watch.)
By comparison, note how reasonably the Age‘s Sydney sister publication dealt with comedian Adam Hills, who was born without a right foot. His prothesis isn’t even shown in the accompanying photograph. But let’s imagine that Hills were to add climate scepticism to his act. How would the Age respond? On form, I’m guessing that Nine’s Australian cricket broadcasts would suddenly have a rival stump cam.
And by the way, what’s so bad about Monckton meeting Tony Abbott? You never saw this Age headline: Churchyard Homilist Meets Failed Divinity Student.
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KEVIN’S KOOLING KONTINUES
Tim Blair
A little late to the party, the SMH’s Peter Hartcher notices that Kevin Rudd no longer wants to talk about climate change:
He has not made one speech on climate change in the past few weeks. Instead, Rudd is trying to change the subject …Others were alert to Rudd’s change on climate change slightly earlier. As for the next “great moral challenge of our time”, it might be the challenge to admit error on global warming. One editor already has his hand up.
Is it no longer ‘’the great moral and economic challenge of our time’’, as Rudd once told us?
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WARMENISTS AT THE BARRICADES
Tim Blair
Their faith upset by recent events, warmenists are lashing out. Canada’s Chris Wood believes that reporting damage to the warmenist cause amounts to reckless endangerment:
It is the equivalent of failing to shout fire in a crowded theater that is slowly filling with deadly fumes.Lie about warming: good. Expose lies about warming: a fraud on the consumer. And in Australia, Labor MP Nick Champion declares that those who reject global warming alarmism are threats to our national security:
To pass it off as journalism is professional negligence ... I think they chose to ignore the only value that justifies our trade at all, and conceal the truth. We used to call that dishonest reporting—a fraud on the consumer.
Climate change sceptics have a profoundly irresponsible approach to our national security because their ideology does not allow them to acknowledge the potential threats we may face, and their denial of the evidence could leave our nation unprepared for a hostile and uncertain future. Make no mistake; if you’re a self confessed climate sceptic then you’re as soft as butter on Australia’s defence.Logically, this means that pacifist hippie types who believe in global warming are in fact the most hawkish of Australian defenders. Who knew?
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SOURCE LOST
Tim Blair
An unusual expression of news priorities from Reuters:
The internet will potentially lose one of its main sources of bestiality videos under a ban approved by the upper house of the Dutch Parliament.Tragic. Bestiality fans will presumably have to fall back on secondary sources instead.
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HOT CARBON
Tim Blair
Carbon rustlers attack:
Sneaky cyber-thieves have made millions by fraudulently obtaining European greenhouse gas emissions allowances and reselling them. The scam has hampered trading of the credits, which are seen as an important tool in curbing climate change, in several European countries ...It might pay these companies to be more sceptical about emails. According to the report, one German concern lost carbon allowances worth US$2.1 million. That’s a lot of nothing.
According to a report in the Wednesday edition of the Financial Times Deutschland, hackers sent e-mails last Thursday to several companies in Europe, Japan and New Zealand …
The cyber-thieves then exploited the user data that was entered into their spoof Web site to transfer emissions allowances to other accounts, mainly in Denmark and Britain, from which they were quickly resold.
(Via Brat)
UPDATE. Eco-boy Dan Box reports that carbon rustlers face a thin future:
Things have got so bad that various sources tell me many traders have now decided to quit the carbon business altogether.No problem. There’s probably still some money to be made in tulip futures.
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DIVE ON IN
Tim Blair
All Wall Street Journal content is free today, for one day only.
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PEAS BE UPON HIM
Tim Blair
Quick-thinking medical improvisation following a fire attack in Darwin. Fifteen people were injured. Five are presently being treated in Royal Darwin Hospital’s high dependency unit.
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REVIEWS REVIEWED, RETRACTED
Tim Blair
Peer review – actor Ed Begley’s favourite subject – ain’t so great, as The Lancet belatedly discovers:
The Lancet today finally retracted the paper that sparked a crisis in MMR vaccination across the UK, following the General Medical Council’s decision that its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had been dishonest.But surely the paper was reviewed before publication? You know, by peers? Yes, it was, according to Horton:
The medical journal’s editor, Richard Horton, told the Guardian today that he realised as soon as he read the GMC findings that the paper, published in February 1998, had to be retracted. “It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” he said. “I feel I was deceived.”
The Lancet had done what it could to establish that the research was valid, by having it peer-reviewed. But there is a limit, he said, to what peer-review can ascertainAll of this comes a little late for some:
Children had been subjected to invasive procedures that were not warranted, a disciplinary panel ruled. They had undergone lumbar punctures and other tests solely for research purposes and without valid ethical approval.Fred Pearce has further on peer-style reviewishness.
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HEY, KIDS!
Tim Blair
Potato Day looms:
There’ll be a free and exclusive coloured potato for each child bringing his/her parents along and the children will get in free.
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THINGS YOU LEARN ABOUT KATE BUSH FROM YOUTUBE COMMENTS
Tim Blair
Now we know:
Her foot print is in The Bata Shoe Museum here in Toronto. She’s a size 4.UPDATE. Commenter and shoe enthusiast Anne B.:
I visited the Bata Shoe Museum a few years ago. It probably helps to be female, but I enjoyed the place – a sizable exhibit of Shoes Through History (ancient sandals, Eskimo boots, alarmingly tiny Chinese shoes for women with bound feet) as well as a collection of recent designs, tending toward the spike-heeled, gaudily colored, and downright silly. Also, the Bata Museum *replaced* a lefty bookstore that used to stand on that site, so perhaps that will permit you to think of the place more kindly.Much more kindly. Thank you, Anne.
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DOUBT ON THE MARCH
Tim Blair
Mark Steyn notes a telling silence:
You have to assume that America’s dying monodailies are now actively auditioning for state ownership. How else to explain the silence of the massed ranks of salaried “environmental correspondents” on the daily revelations emerging from the fast disintegrating “scientific consensus” on “climate change”? You get livelier coverage from the Chinese press.So does the BBC. Click to hear Professor Chris Field, co-chairman of the IPCC Working Group, describe the 2007 report as the most “ambitious” scientific assessment ever undertaken. Interesting word. Meanwhile, unsettled scientist Phil Jones feels the heat:
But in competitive newspaper markets they still know a story when they see one. Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of “settled science” is that even the eco-lefties at the Guardian and the Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts.
“I feel tremendously pressurised by all this but I’m trying to continue my work in the science. I think it’s very important and it’s potentially very serious for the future of mankind in decades to come.”One commenter responds:
Professor Jones feels tremendously pressurised? What does he think we feel when based on his “evidence”, we will see escalating fuel, energy and transport bills, jobs lost to the Far East, and a whole raft of social engineering that will make us wonder whether life is worth living?Good point.
UPDATE. A. Kam Napier, editor of Honolulu magazine:
Because of manmade global warming, I warned in 1996, that “sea levels could rise as much as three feet by the year 2100 … warming can lead to hotter and more frequent heat waves … stronger and more frequent hurricanes to Hawai‘i … endanger native plants species [and] coral reefs.” These dire predictions came from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia provide much of the IPCC’s analysis and predictions. In November 2009, hackers released thousands of e-mails from the CRU, going back years, and it is these e-mails that reveal the very unscientific, unethical activities I described above.Read on.
I feel I’ve been had.
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Why is this hysteric still head of the IPCC?
Andrew Bolt
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explains why critics of his vested interests, flawed science and deceits are wrong:
They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder – and I hope they put it on their faces every day.That’s it. Goodbye.
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Facebook censors Rudd’s critics
Andrew Bolt
Labor and its friends really have a problem with free speech on the Internet:
Today, we can reveal that online political speech has been dealt another blow with Facebook, the popular social networking site, being accused of political censorship after it removed the group KEVIN RUDD = EPIC FAIL.Really? Facebook normally isn’t so sensitive - well, not when the vitriolic abuse is heaped on conservatives, instead.
Before it was removed the Facebook group is understood to have had over 3000 members and focused on building a list what it described as Kevin Rudd’s broken promises…
The group is believed to have been banned because it criticised an individual, the Prime Minister.
Question: who complained to Facebook? Anyone in Rudd’s office?
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Panic! NASA warns you’ll drown in another 300,000 years
Andrew Bolt
Earth Observatory, of the pro-warmist NASA, warns that Antarctica “has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002” and that “if all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 60 meter (197 feet)”
Now, why would you scare folks so when the truth, as Steven Goddard notes, is that:
- Satellite data shows Antarctica cooling, not warming.You’d really, really have to have an agenda to have issued the scare that NASA has.
- Antarctic sea ice has expanded over the past three decades, not shrunk.
- At even NASA’s claimed rate of melting, it would take 300,000 years for that Antarctic ice to melt.
- At the rate of sea level rise measured over the past century, it will take more than 18,000 years for the seas to rise 60 metres.
- In fact, the seas have not risen for nearly four years.
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Climategate: the slow, slow holding of the guilty to account
Andrew Bolt
Pennsylvania State University announces a new inquiry into Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann’s role in the Climategate scandal. It seems from the press release that Penn State’s aim is to show critics it won’t ignore the allegations against Mann, but that it prefers not to uphold them against one if its own.
Meanwhile even warming extremist George Monbiot insists Dr Phil Jones should be dumped as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, and the tiny and stupid best that he can say for deeply compromised IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri is that the great Satan Bush seemed to prefer him.
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Psst. Rudd doesn’t really believe it any more, either
Andrew Bolt
Peter Hartcher has a good question:
Tony Abbott’s Coalition doesn’t believe that man-made climate change is real. Last year Abbott called the idea ‘’absolute crap’’. So why would he bother announcing a policy to fix it?But Hartcher really should ask that very same thing of Kevin Rudd, who still plans to spend countless more billions - and cause countless more damage - on the very same “crap”. Yet as even Hartcher now belatedly notices:
But the intriguing part is that Rudd is not working to rally public opinion. He has not made one speech on climate change in the past few weeks. Instead, Rudd is trying to change the subject… Is it no longer ‘’the great moral and economic challenge of our time’’, as Rudd once told us?Well, no, Peter. Rudd’s greatest conviction last year has now turned to “crap”. So ask him why he’s spending so much on something he now barely dares to mention and and in which he seems no longer to believe.
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How the 7.30 Report nobbled Monckton
Andrew Bolt
When I heard that Lord Monckton would appear on the ABC’s 7.30 Report, I wondered: “How will they rig this?”
I mean, would host Kerry O’Brien, a warmist, really dare interview Monckton on his own, and let him put his arguments? Would he really give Monckton the same opportunity to speak that O’Brien regularly allows warmists such as Sir Nicholas Stern, Tim Flannery and Al Gore - none of them climate scientists themselves, and with records between them of exaggeration, grotesque alarmism, statistical trickery, vested interests, untruths, misrepresentations and false predictions that O’Brien let’s go through unchallenged?.
Answer: of course not. Check those links on the warmists’ names to see how O’Brien lets climate alarmists put their case directly, in friendly one-on-one discussions with him . But now see how Monckton, a sceptic, was set up.
First, Monckton was denied a similar in-studio interview, unedited, with O’Brien, presumably because O’Brien would have been hopelessly exposed and outgunned. Instead, he appeared only in an edited report, interspliced with comments from three fervent warmists: green lobbyist and lawyer John Connor from the Climate Institute, Chief Scientist Penny Sackett and Ben McNeil from the Climate Change Research Centre. (Naturally, not a single sceptical scientist was interviewed in this report.)
Second, the first of those warmists was interviewed before we even got to hear from Monckton, just to set the scene.
Third, the condescending reporter attempted to portray Monckton as merely some colorful “showman”, giving more air time to his jokes than to his arguments, but also asking whether he was “dangerous” and part of a “disinformation campaign”.
Fourth, Monckton’s real arguments about the weaknesses of the IPCC warmist science and the fraud we’ve since seen in its “peer review” processes were largely skipped over, reduced to little more than bland summaries. I’ll quote the references to Monckton’s criticism of the warming science in their entirety:
TRACY BOWDEN: In simple terms, Lord Monckton disputes the fact that the earth is warming and that the activity of humans is to blame. He’s totally opposed to plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and believes growing crops for biofuels has left millions of children starving.That’s it, complete. Much of the rest of his comments on this long report (which did at least refer to the recent IPCC scandals) were instead replies to questions about his motives and claims that he was part of a “conspiracy” and “a full scale orchestrated misinformation campaign”.
LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON: We will not tolerate lies anymore. No more bogus statistics. No more bent graphs. No more made up results…
LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON: First of all, there has been warming, yes. For 300 years. So where would you expect the warmest years to come? Of course at the end of the period. Let’s also going on to the ice sheets for instance. In fact, there’s been no significant loss of ice worldwide, sea ice, for instance. There’s no clear evidence that sea level is rising any faster than it has for the last couple of hundred years.
Fifth, despite this being purportedly a report on Monckton and his views, it’s in fact Monckton’s critics who get most air time. The three warmists get to say 412 words (not including those of the reporter or of IPPC chairman Rajendra Pachauri); Monckton himself is permitted 401.
Sixth, while Monckton’s motives and funding were questioned, his critics’ were not, allowing them to falsely present themselves as disinterested. Yet Connor’s institute, for instance, depends on the warming scare for almost all its donations from green sympathisers. Sackett has conceded her appointment by the Rudd Government was a political one.
Yet with all this spin, all these restrictions, all the red herrings and all the abuse, see how Monckton’s critics actually betrayed themselves - and their political agenda.
Did a single one of them actually advance a single argument to prove Monckton’s arguments false? No.
But check instead the truly pathetic kind of arguments - mere political sloganeering from the Left - advanced by McNeil, who calls himself a scientist:
Lord Monckton is a former political adviser for a UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. I think it’s very dangerous for us to take scientific advice from someone like that.Oohhh, Thatcher. Booga booga. Actually, young Ben, Monckton is also a gifted mathematician and a scholar, which explains how he came to mauil you in a debate on Channel 7.
And this is Connor’s attempt at rebuttal:
It’s unhealthy to be in denial about the risks that is poses for Australia, the Australian economy and even the for the global economy.Summing up: the ABC finds it almost impossible to hold an honest debate on global warming. Warmists are allowed unchallenged air time, while sceptics are made examples of. Yet even then warmist scientists and activists cannot find an argument to save themselves from the few sceptics who finally get half a hard word in edgewise.
Your (ABC) news is being manipulated, but you can now see the fraud backstage though the gaping cracks.
UPDATE
Several readers point out that the reporter had so little interest in Monckton’s views that she could even sum them up correctly, even after being told on camera what they were:
TRACY BOWDEN: In simple terms, Lord Monckton disputes the fact that the earth is warming ...
LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON: First of all, there has been warming, yes.
===
The media is now turning on Rudd, too
Andrew Bolt
I’d say the News Ltd papers have cooled a little on Kevin Rudd. Check this unusual and hostile joint check-his-promises exercise today.
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph:
Kevin Rudd’s 795 days of empty promisesMelbourne’s Herald Sun:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yet to deliver on dozens of election promisesAdelaide’s Advertiser:
Trail of broken promisesThe full list of the broken promises is not on line, But the Herald Sun’s news story gives the flavor:
KEVIN Rudd is yet to deliver on dozens of election commitments, leaving a trail of backflips and broken promises as he prepares to fight for a second term.The editorials now tend to the hostile, too.
A Herald Sun analysis of Labor’s 2007 election commitments reveal many have been quietly axed or are far from being met.
The Prime Minister apologised to the Stolen Generations and signed the Kyoto Protocol, but just one of 2650 promised trades training centres will accept students this semester.
Of 260 childcare centres he pledged would be built in schools and TAFES, only one has opened its doors.
And just two of Labor’s 31 promised GP Super Clinics are fully operational.
Promised Healthy Kids Checks have failed to make an impact on preschooler health, with GPs seeing just 62,823 children so far.
Plans to attract retired nurses back into hospitals have also bombed, with just 752 accepting a $6000 return-to-work bonus. Labor hoped 7750 would take up the offer.
Daily Telegraph (which backed Rudd in 2007):
Simply put, Rudd has thus far failed to match his words with deeds.Herald Sun:
Not only is he facing a resurgent Coalition under Tony Abbott, but (Rudd) has a string of broken promises to explain to the Australian people… Mr Rudd is on the back foot for the first time since coming to power and yet to show whether he can move forward. - so how come no discussion on a successor? - ed.
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We’re just their cyber-world
Andrew Bolt
No rules, no sympathy:
HOTELIERS have told a federal government inquiry into youth violence that pub brawls had not increased but attacks were more vicious and visible.
The Australian Hotels Association said generation Y drinkers had been raised on TV violence but lacked the empathy that a thumping in the school ground had instilled in previous generations. ‘’We are getting people … going out having shaved, showered and slipping a knife in the pocket, which is a very strange attitude to going out and having a good time,’’ the association’s national president, Thomas McGuire, said.
This ‘’significant change in social concern for one another’’, and not alcohol, was to blame.
The association’s chief executive, Bill Healey, ... told the government’s family and youth committee that while the number of violent attacks at pubs and bars had not increased from 10 years ago, there had been a rise in viciousness.
‘’These kids have been, on the one hand, exposed to substantial amounts of violence in what they see on TV and video games … but they [have] not actually experienced a lot of pain. They don’t get kicked at school - the empathy factor of knowing how it feels.’’
Mr Healey complained that the rules of the street once meant you did not ‘’king-hit’’ people but now incidents involved people being kicked in the head on the ground and women being hit with beer glasses.
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The Age of barbarians
Andrew Bolt
‘Mad Monk’ meets MoncktonCould The Age declare its politics - and it’s reliance on childish abuse - any more clearly?
Tony Abbott meets the world’s most famous climate change sceptic, Lord Christopher Monckton.
In this one picture and caption, it not only mocks sceptic Lord Monckton as a monkey and ridicules a symptom of his Graves Disease, but appeals to anti-Catholic bigotry by calling Opposition Leader Tony Abbott the “mad Monk”. Only a special kind of savage, terrified by a threat to his animistic deities, could concentrate so much invective into one image.
When I was recruited by The Age in 1979, it was still clinging on to its reputation as the paper of record. Three decades on it’s now an embarrassing measure of the decline of reason, and the rise of hooting, cat-calling, mob-whipping vilification and myth-making in its place.
Warning. Are you a scientist with a club foot or freckles? Are you short or overweight? Bald? Are you confined like a Stephen Hawking to a wheel chair? Then for God’s sake do not out yourself as a climate sceptic, for there is no telling what The Age might then do to you, too?
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Warmist scientists own hungry dogs
Andrew Bolt
New Zealand warmists claim they’ve lost their original data, too:
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings.Is this the work of the same dog that ate the University of East Anglia’s homework, too?
In December, NZCSC issued a formal request for the schedule of adjustments under the Official Information Act 1982, specifically seeking copies of “the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculations”. On 29 January, NIWA responded that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature.
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.Pardon the scepticism, but:
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The “climategate” controversy intensified last night when the senior British scientist at its centre, Professor Phil Jones, faced fresh accusations that he attempted to withhold data that could cast doubt on evidence for rising world temperatures.Background to the allegations against NIWA here.
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How our defence minister (allegedly) got $150,000 from China
Andrew Bolt
The Fitzgibbon scandal turns out to be just as serious as I suspected:
PRIVATE records of a Chinese-Australian businesswoman close to the former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon say he received substantial payments as part of a campaign to cultivate him as an agent of political and business influence.Fitzgibbon denies receiving any more from Liu than he’s declared already. Yet this latest news makes the suspicion even stronger that Liu cultivated (the no doubt foolishly unsuspecting) Fitzgibbon as a source of information for the Chinese regime. I don’t claim at all that Fitzgibbon revealed to her anything he should not have, or that he’d have every agreed to do so. But how colossally and irresponsibly stupid was he to accept such gifts as he did, and to put himself under such obligations?
Confidential papers of the businesswoman Helen Liu contradict claims last year by Mr Fitzgibbon - and his father, the former Labor MP Eric Fitzgibbon - that they had no financial or business relationship with Ms Liu.
Mr Fitzgibbon resigned from cabinet last June… The minister’s political standing had already been weakened by his failure to disclose that he had accepted two first-class flights to China from Ms Liu, a wealthy entrepreneur with high-level political and military contacts in Beijing.
The documents show Ms Liu recorded her payment of 850,000 yuan - about $150,000 - to Joel Fitzgibbon under the heading ‘’money paid including expenses and gifts’’.
Mind you, questions should now also be asked again of the gifts Kevin Rudd received from sources suspiciously close to the Chinese regime. And when was Julia Gillard planning to come clean:
It can also be revealed that the office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was told last April by lawyers for a former business associate of Ms Liu that Mr Fitzgibbon might have had more extensive dealings with the businesswoman than acknowledged.UPDATE
Fitzgibbon denies strongly receiving the cash and says he’s taking legal action against Fairfax. Gillard has told Parliament the allegations were “news to me” and the first she’d heard of them was this morning.
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What on earth has Rudd actually done?
Andrew Bolt
Niki Savva, a self-confessed Leftist who worked for Peter Costello, on the mirage that’s Kevin Rudd:
As Opposition Leader, Rudd dragged out the brand new conservative suit Therese had bought for him, and vowed to halt reckless government spending. He said climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time and pledged to tackle it, promised to take over hospitals in a year and bring in an education revolution, threatened to take the Japanese to court over whaling, warned he would turn back refugee boats, and promised to live at the Lodge.I think a couple of big newspapers are about to take up this very theme.
He has done none of those things, and I doubt he ever will.
I don’t know why he is there, who he thinks or is, or what he thinks a Prime Minister’s job involves. It actually means he can and must do things, big things, which can shape the country he leads and not just spin from one pic fac to another.
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Laugh at warmist King. Please
Andrew Bolt
Britian’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, is a global warming zealot. And with the same scrupulous regard for evidence he’s reach this conclusion:
A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government’s former chief scientist. Sir David King...After being laughed at very loudly, King hurriedly retracted:
Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a ‘side-issue’, he said. But it emerged that he had been misinformed about key facts.Overheated speculation because on misinformation about key facts? If King is now laughed at for his warmist beliefs, will he now retract them on the same grounds, too?
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Aren’t the ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine and Ten just one same-same too many?
Andrew Bolt
I wonder if Australian viewers would like an alternative to no-argument Left politics on their televisions, too:
Fox News ... had the top 13 programs on cable news in total viewers for the fifth month in a row, and the top 13 programs in the A25-54 demographic for the first time in more than five years.UPDATE
Niki Savva, the journalist and former Costello staffer, in her new book, So Greek, only confirms the bias:
Network Ten political editor Paul Bongiorno also gets a swipe. Savva says he “made clear his distaste for the government and couldn’t wait for it to be booted out” but insisted the Coalition members appear as guests on Meet the Press or there would be grief. “Is that a threat?” she asked. “That’s a promise,” he replied.
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Just follow the money … to Labor
Andrew Bolt
It’s odd that the cash-strapped Liberals are portrayed as the party backed by big money, when it’s Labor which has its pockets stuffed. Andrew Norton:
Of the $6.5 million in political expenditure declared in 2008-09 (down dramatically from the 2007-08 election year spending of $50.6 million) 94.6% was spent by unions, 3.6% by GetUp!, 1.5% by environmental groups, and the remaining $11,170 by the Aged Care Association (SA)… This year the only individual I could find named in donor disclosure statements was ‘Mr/Ms Jo Skrynski’, who I presume is Joseph Skrzynski. He gave $137,500 to GetUp!Joseph Skrzynski? Who might this man be, who is so far to the Left that he’d donate so much even to GetUp!, whose spokesman was once Kevin Rudd’s now press secretary?
The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy today announced the appointment of Mr Joseph Skrzynski AO as the new Chair of SBS.Gosh, a politically active Leftist appointed chairman of the SBS by the Rudd Government. Now there’s a surprise.
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