Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Headlines Wednesday 3rd February 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

For those living under the ALP or US Democrats, 'Hows them apples?'
=== Bible Quote ===
“However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him"—”- 1 Corinthians 2:9
===

U.S. Government reportedly tried to stop GM from selling Saab to a Dutch automaker in December due to possible involvement in the deal by the Russian Mob.

Gates: End 'Don't Ask' Policy
Gates, Mullen say they support Obama decision to drop policy on gays in the military, ordering review

GOP Rips 'Too Much' Budget
Top Republican charges budget 'features too many new taxes, too much new spending and too much new debt'

Palin Rips Rahm for Dropping 'R'-Bomb
Sarah Palin calls for firing of White House chief of staff for 'f-ing retarded' comment during strategy session

Neo-Pagans Get Worship Circle at Air Force Academy

Witches, Druids and pagans rejoice! The Air Force Academy in Colorado is about to recognize its first Wiccan prayer circle, a Stonehenge on the Rockies that will serve as an outdoor place of worship for the academy's neo-pagans. - they have been 'convening' for more than a decade, since they were established under Bill Clinton, and get the extra stones under Obama. - ed.

Australian State to Censor Internet

An Australian state has become one of the few places in the world to censor the Internet, the Adelaide ...

Climate Researchers Manipulated and Hid Data

Climate-gate has struck again: A new investigation reveals crucial flaws in data about climate change, as well as attempts by leading researchers to cover up their own mistakes.

Dad snapped then murdered baby
A BABY had a "sadly curtailed, miserable life" before his father "snapped" and murdered him.

Police linked to crime gangs and drugs
CLAIMS of corruption with police linked to major Gold Coast drug trafficking is set to rock the force.

Mum gets son, 5, too drunk to walk, talk
A MUM got her five-year-old son so drunk he could barely speak or stand up, a court has heard.

Drunk mum case ignites debate
A DECISION not to jail a mum who plied her son with alcohol has drawn political fire.

Student allegedly drugged and raped
A HOSTEL owner allegedly spiked two students' drinks before raping one, a court has heard.

Worst movie of all time just revealed
EMPIRE magazine has just released the verdict on what's been voted as the world's worst movie ever created. - they get it wrong, there are many more worse movies. -ed.


Oscar the therapy cat apparently knows when someone is about to die, but the doctor who told the world about his special ability says Oscar's no feline Grim Reaper / AP

Black Saturday accused released on bail
TWO boys accused of starting a killer Black Saturday bushfire blaze have been freed on bail.

From Central to Town Hall for $10
COMMUTERS will pay up to $10 more to travel between Central and Town Hall under the State Government's new public transport fare structure.

Millions flying on unsafe airplanes
US airlines permitted at least 65,000 flights with millions of passengers on planes that were not fit for takeoff over the past six years

Seven fireys on sex assault charges
SEVEN firefighters were yesterday charged with the repeated indecent assault of a colleague at a fire station 20 years ago. The men - including five who still work for NSW Fire Brigades - had been under investigation since March last year after complaints were made against them. Police formed Strike Force Coolara to investigate the allegations made by a male colleague of sexual abuse and bullying at the fire station in Sydney in 1989. Police yesterday charged the seven men - aged between 43 and 61 - with six counts each of indecent assault in company.

Pole-sitter farmer Peter Spencer in tears over massive support for his cause

IT was the day the country came to Canberra, with almost 2000 farmers joining hunger striker Peter Spencer to march on Parliament House demanding compensation for losing their property rights. Yesterday's show of solidarity was almost too much for Mr Spencer, who sobbed as he addressed the crowd and embraced 2GB radio presenter Alan Jones.

Online election comment gag relaxed
THE Attorney-General has backed down over censoring internet comment, but there's a catch.
=== Journalists Corner ===

In his first cable interview, John Edwards' former assistant Andrew Young divulges NEW details...
And explains how the presidential candidate got away with leading a double life!
===

Guest: Dave Ramsey
He's helped millions of Americans to get debt free. So, what's his advice for fixing our country's money woes? Dave Ramsey chats with Neil!
===
FBI Under Fire!
Why hasn't a critical terrorist investigation squad been activated? It's a Factor investigation!
===
"Unnecessary" & "Unsustainable"
Sen. Judd Gregg blasts Obama's budget as "fiscal insanity!" So, what would he do? Greta finds out!

=== Comments ===
Finding Common Ground With President Obama
By Bill O'Reilly
The president's poll numbers are better Monday. He got a nice bounce from the State of the Union address last week.

According to Rasmussen, 35 percent of Americans now strongly approve of Mr. Obama's job performance, while 39 percent strongly disapprove. A big improvement for the president.

Mr. Obama did a smart thing last week. He said he wants to work with the Republican Party for the good of the folks. He also said he's not an ideologue. Some people believe that; some people don't.

My beef is not with Mr. Obama's posture towards the GOP. I think both parties play far too many play political games. No, my concern is the gulf between the president and you, the folks.

Three examples. First, on Friday, the Obama administration announced it may not try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other Al Qaeda thugs here in New York City. Of course, there was no reason to run up hundreds of millions of dollars in expense when those killers could have handled by the military. In fact, 44 percent of Americans believe the Al Qaeda should be tried in Guantanamo Bay, an astounding number considering all the controversy. So why did it take months for the White House to figure this deal out? Excellent question.

Second, health care. Americans simply don't understand the bill. More than 2,000 pages. And the president doesn't understand it either because he couldn't explain it in 29 speeches. So you would think he would simplify matters if he wants Republican support, that he would put in legislation to stop frivolous lawsuits against medical people and to allow insurance companies to compete nationwide. I mean, why not do that? That's what the Republicans want, and it seems to make sense. There's no downside to tort reform and increased insurance competition. So the folks are skeptical.

And third, some right-wingers condemn President Obama for the trillion-dollar stimulus package, but "Talking Points" thinks that's unfair. There is no question the economy could have collapsed in 2009. It was very possible that the financial system would simply melt down. So the feds had to pour money in to prop up the financial institutions. I said this from day one, and I got hammered from the right for that, but I was right.

However, there is more than $500 billion still left in federal stimulus money. It's just sitting there. President Obama should put the money back into the Treasury. We don't need it now. There's no threat of collapse anymore, and paying down the $13 trillion debt with stimulus money would send a positive message to the world about the U.S. economy.

Read my lips: More federal economic stimulus is not needed. The system will work itself out.

Those three examples are common sense. If the president embraces them, his bond with the folks, you, should grow.
===
RISE EXPECTED
Tim Blair
A banker examines interest rates.

UPDATE. A sharper view:

===
DOCUMENTATION REQUIRED
Tim Blair
Civilised people agree that information about South Australia should be restricted, but this may be taking things too far:
South Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet.

The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires internet bloggers, and anyone making a comment on next month’s state election, to publish their real name and postcode when commenting on the poll.

The law will affect anyone posting a comment on an election story on The Advertiser’s AdelaideNow website, as well as other news sites such as The Punch, the ABC’s The Drum and Fairfax newspapers’ National Times site.
Those laws also apply here, should anyone wish to comment on that election. To combat this, a range of Adelaide-sounding names – including Crispin Vertnershuss, Warren Schnitzel, Tableau Huntwhistle-Lee, David Penberthy, Calliope Rhev, Womad and The Family – will be supplied to law-dodging commenters upon request.

UPDATE:
Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has made a “humiliating” backdown and announced he will retrospectively repeal his law censoring internet comment on the state election.
I blame Mike Rann. Or one of the several Mike Ranns who appeared in comments.
===
PRAYERS ANSWERED
Tim Blair
The Age reports:
An atheist convention in Melbourne has sold out six weeks before it opens despite no aid from any level of government, organisers said yesterday.
It’s a miracle!
===
COPENHAGEN KEEPS ON GIVING
Tim Blair
Happy poll news for Tony Abbott:
Tony Abbott’s opposition to the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme appears to have lifted the Coalition to its best position since the 2007 election loss, and Kevin Rudd’s personal support is at its lowest since he became Prime Minister.

The electoral turnaround has occurred since the collapse of the Copenhagen climate change conference, and Mr Rudd yesterday warned his parliamentary colleagues that Labor “could lose the next election”.
Dennis Shanahan:
The Liberals are still likely to lose the next election, but the opposition has fight and the government appears uncertain.

Abbott’s dumping of the ETS last December, combined with the Copenhagen climate change “fiasco”, has galvanised the opposition and rattled the government.
Bad news for Kevin Rudd: Barack Obama – the great vote-doomer of Copenhagen and Boston – is coming to Australia.
===
Pity not the Cougar’s prey
Andrew Bolt

COUGARS don’t actually leave scars. Or none I could ever find.
===
Tell Rann where to put his ban
Andrew Bolt
From the Premier whose legal action has effectly banned discussion of his alleged affair with a bar maid comes this disgraceful attempt to censor free speech by intimidating the speakers:
South Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet.

The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires internet bloggers, and anyone making a comment on next month’s state election, to publish their real name and postcode when commenting on the poll.

The law will affect anyone posting a comment on an election story on The Advertiser’s AdelaideNow website, as well as other news sites such as The Punch, the ABC’s The Drum and Fairfax newspapers’ National Times site.
No doubt many of you in comments below will promptly break this obscene law. Well, let Mike Rann do his worst. If there is justice for his gross impudence, he will be defeated next month and the law repealed.

(Thanks to many outraged readers.)

UPDATE

My, my. But what brand of government paranoia inspired both this draconian restriction ... and this astonishing prediction by its architect:

Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said the law would not impinge on free speech and claimed that he expected Adelaide’s The Advertiser and AdelaideNow to “publish false stories about me, invent things about me to punish me’’.

Mr Atkinson described AdelaideNow as “not just a sewer of criminal defamation’’ but also “a sewer of identity theft and fraud’’.

===
The great IPCC scam: now it quotes a how-to-clean-boots guide
Andrew Bolt
The IPCC’s latest impeccable, peer-reviewed scientific source: a tourism group’s boot-cleaning guide.

Here’s what the IPCC claims in its 2007 report, on which Kevin Rudd says he relies:
The multiple stresses of climate change and increasing human activity on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a clear vulnerability (see Section 15.6.3), and have necessitated the implementation of stringent clothing decontamination guidelines for tourist landings on the Antarctic Peninsula (IAATO, 2005).
The IPCC lists its source:
IAATO, 2005: Update on boot and clothing decontamination guidelines and the introduction and detection of diseases in Antarctic wildlife: IAATO’s perspective. Paper submitted by the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) XXVIII. IAATO, 10 pp. http://www.iaato.org/info.html.
But as Climatequotes.com notes in amazement:
So the IPCC cites a boot and clothing cleaning guide as evidence that the “multiple stresses of climate change...have necessitated the implementation of stringent clothing decontamination guidelines”. That might be laughable in and of itself, but the problem is the article doesn’t even mention climate change. Once. Nothing at all about global warming, or temperature increase. Nothing!
Someone call the police.

(All the links you need are at the link above. Via Watts Up With That.)
===
Climategate - now the Guardian discovers what was always there
Andrew Bolt
The only real things that’s changed now is the media’s willingness to see the fraud and fiddling that was always part of the great global warming scam. To finally see the fraud and fiddling that bloggers have written about for years.

Example? Well, take the Guardian.

For nearly three years, mathematician Douglas Keenan has campaigned to get the University of East Anglia, the University of Albany, the IPCC and the media to accept that a key piece of evidence behind the IPCC’s claims that the world was warming was based on a study that was wrong, if not outright fraudulent. Keenan described not just the tricking up of results to hide the urban heat island effect, but the disgraceful efforts by climate scientists and University of Albany administrators to hush up the scandal.

When Climategate broke last year (again, through the blogs), I discovered and noted that one Climategate scientist, Australian Tom Wigley, was so shocked by this particular scandal that he had written scathing (private) emails to the head of the now discredited Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, damning what had been done.

I also summarised the scandal, which had also been well-covered by other blogs:
One of the biggest problems with calculating temperature trends over the past century is how much to allow for the fact that measurements in our fast-growing concrete jungles will suffer from the “urban heat island” effect of all those extra machines and concrete. How much of the warming until 2001 must be discounted as a result?..

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.
Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

For all this time, the Guardian kept up its alarmist campaign on global warming, and ignored this particular scandal.

But today I read that the Guardian has a “scoop” thanks to its “investigation” and “today reveals” what it last year wouldn’t:
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
And Wigley and his emails are “revealed”, too:
Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang’s work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. “Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?” he asked Jones. He continued: “Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?”
This example actually suggests how complicit the media has been in keeping the global warming scare alive by failing to report what was actually under its nose.

But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive. The papers will, of course, take the credit.
===
Where’s your proof of that $100 billion, Mr Rudd?
Andrew Bolt
You can believe Rudd - or believe Rudd is a liar:
Kevin Rudd is sticking to his claim of a $100 billion blow-out in private health insurance rebates, despite the figure not being included in the latest intergenerational report…

Mr Rudd on Sunday said the figure was contained in the report, released by Treasurer Wayne Swan on Monday.

While the report showed the lack of a means test for the 30 per cent rebate would cost $1.9 billion over three years, there was no reference to the $100 billion figure over the “several decades” quoted by Mr Rudd.

“All the underpinning data provided by the Treasury in the preparation of that report contains that number,” he said.

“The bottom line is that this is the cost to Australia of the Liberals continuing to block much-needed reform to private health insurance for the wealthiest Australians.”
Let’s just nail the lie Rudd told on Sunday:
What the intergenerational report tomorrow will reveal for the first time is that the cumulative impact of knocking that major reform back is in the order of one hundred billion dollars over the next several decades. This is the time frame in which we are planning major reform for the health and hospital system. So Mr Abbot may have ripped a billion dollars out of the health system and the hospital system when he was health minister, that’s bad enough, but the to rip a further hundred billion dollars out of the future of the health and hospital system by ideologically blocking this major reform makes no sense at all.
Does the report make any such claim? No.

I don’t think many people can yet believe that a man who seems so churchy can lie so desperately when under pressure. Yet Rudd’s list is long - the sleeping-in-cars story, kicked off the farm, the false Anzac dawn, Scores, the “sick girl” excuse for sending the Oceanic Viking boat people to Indonesia, the “reckless spending must stop” promise, the dumping of our “non-German- speaking” diplomat, the “no special deal” claim for the Oceanic Viking Tamils, FuelWatch, the no-responsibility-for-the-boat-surge claim, formalising the “stolen generations” myth, the 750,000 homes will drown claim (among all the other warming deceits), the I-haven’t-read-the-IPCC-draft-treaty excuse....
===
Rudd leads world in climate stupidity
Andrew Bolt
The Copenhagen farce exposed. Just a few dozen of the world’s nations have met the January 31 deadline set in Copenhagen to say how much they’ll cut their total emissions.

The answer from China (the world’s biggest emitter) and India (soon to be the second biggest) is: won’t cut.

The answers from most of the developed world is: er, that depends … especially on what the US does.

And the US Administration talks, but will Congress now act?

Yet which country, like a shag on a rock, boldly promises to slash emissions hard, regardless? Which will be made to pay for this futile gesture, which will lower world temperatures by zero?

We should be ashamed to be so suicidally gullible.

No comments: