=== Todays Toons ===
“The Great Presidential Race of 1856″Four years out of the presidency, some voters thought Millard Fillmore might be a good candidate again. His old Whig Party was dead, but he won the nomination of the Know-Nothings, or the Native American Party (“Native American” not meaning “American Indian” at the time).
Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the 13th President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853 and the last member of the Whig Party to hold that office. He was the second Vice President to assume the presidency upon the death of a sitting president, succeeding Zachary Taylor, who died of what is thought to be acute gastroenteritis. Fillmore was never elected president; after serving out Taylor's term, he failed to gain the nomination of the Whigs for president in the 1852 presidential election, and, four years later, in the 1856 presidential election, he again failed to win election as the Know Nothing Party and Whig candidate.
=== Bible Quotes ===
“But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold. My feet have closely followed his steps; I have kept to his way without turning aside.”- Job 23:10-11=== Headlines ===
The year was 1892 — when Americans were introduced to Coke, immigrants started arriving at Ellis Island, Dr. Naismith wrote the rules of basketball, Lizzie Borden whacked her parents, and Benjamin Harrison lost the White House — when the current climate measurement system was put into effect.
Sign of Compromise?
Obama to incorporate some GOP feedback into health care plan in hopes of jump-starting stalled drives but Republican senators call it tinkering around the edges
Right to Bear Arms Under Heavy Fire
High court appears willing to say U.S. Constitution's right to possess guns limits state, local regulation of firearms
Phone May Hold Clue to Missing Hiker
Two 21st century forms of communication are focus of solving old-fashioned mystery in hiker's disappearance
Peter Walsh's dreams of holding his family will be realised when he becomes the first Australian to have breakthrough surgery
Boy critical in bullying nightmare
AN eight-year-old boy is fighting for his life in hospital after being hit by a 4WD while fleeing a bully.
Rudd's bad vibes scupper early election
PRIME Minister turning off women voters and is superficial and complacent, polls find.
53 cent theft leads to Aussies' deportation
UNITED States throws out illegal family after boy, 13, punched classmate and stole money.
Fevola hits back in nude Bingle row
AFL star calls in the lawyers to fight claims he "passed around" a nude photo of Lara Bingle.
New weapon in terror fight - the nose
SCIENTISTS sniff out new form of identification that could replace fingerprint and iris technology.
Sydney, is this all we've got?
CLIMB the Harbour Bridge, look at the sails of our Opera House, but after that there's not much to keep visitors to Sydney interested, a new report claims.
Scratch cards tipped for supermarkets
LOTTO tickets and scratchies could soon be sold beyond newsagents after $850m sell-off to Tatts Group.
Dad killed daughter 'to end rape pain'
ACCUSED allegedly drove teen to secluded pub car park and then stabbed her with a butcher's knife after plotting her death.
UN human rights group urges Egypt to stop shooting migrants
THE UN human rights chief urged Egyptian forces today to stop shooting at African migrants trying to enter Israel illegally. The call came after 60 people were killed in the past two and a half years entering Israel. "While migrants often lose their lives accidentally when travelling in overcrowded boats, or trying to cross remote land borders, I know of no other country where so many unarmed migrants and asylum seekers appear to have been deliberately killed in this way by government forces," Navi Pillay said. "It is a deplorable state of affairs, and the sheer number of victims suggests that at least some Egyptian security officials have been operating a shoot-to-kill policy ... Sixty killings can hardly be an accident."
=== Journalists Corner ===
We aid and protect nations around the world!
So, why does Mitt Romney feel the administration is always apologizing for America?
Web of Deceit!
A teen is sent away for an internet sex scheme! "Is it Legal" examines the online crime!
===
Guest: Sen. John Thune
Will the Dems try to force through a health care plan & what's the GOP's strategy for blocking a possible partisan push? Greta gets answers.
===
Live from the Middle East!
Israel, the Palestinian territories, even Syria - could these be the next big investment opportunities for America? Cheryl Casone gets answers!
We at USCB are ecstatic about the Oscars this year. Burma VJ has been nominated for best documentary film, and James Cameron, a longtime supporter of Burma's freedom struggle, is up for 3 academy awards for his acclaimed film Avatar.
This year, during your Oscar-watching get-together, turn this momentum around freedom and human rights in Burma into action. Ask your friends to sign a petition urging your member of Congress to co-sponsor House Resolution 898, which calls for the release of all political prisoners of conscience and an end to the systematic and widespread violations of human rights against the ethnic minorities inside Burma. Click here for more information.
Downright gripping and utterly inspiring, Burma VJ hails worldwide recognition for the selfless journalists who courted arrest, torture, and lengthy imprisonments in order to shine a spotlight on Burma's freedom struggle. If you have not had the chance to see Burma VJ, check out the trailer here.
We would also like to congratulate James Cameron, who is a strong advocate for human rights in Burma, for his outstanding work and his Oscar nominations. Check out this video spot featuring James Cameron on the topic of Burma.
Films alone will not bring about political change in Burma. Your action can make a difference. Be the voice that contributes to the growing momentum around human rights and democracy in Burma. During the Oscars 2010, take a moment to circulate this petition to your member of Congress asking them to support House Resolution 898. When you are done, please mail the petition to Attention: Michael Haack, U.S. Campaign for Burma, 1444 N Street, NW, Suite A2, Washington, DC 20005.
=== Comments ===
Barney Frank, President Obama and Your Money
By Bill O'Reilly
This is a huge week for the president, as he will tell the nation how he's going to deliver health care reform.
The latest Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll says that after last week's health care summit, the president got a slight bump: 44 percent now want Obamacare, as opposed to 41 percent the week before.
But — and this is a big but — 52 percent of Americans do not want Obamacare for a variety of reasons.
"Talking Points" says no to the multitrillion-dollar entitlement, primarily because of the cost and the chaos factor.
Let me take you back to July of 2008 when Congressman Barney Frank, in charge of the House Finance Committee, said this about the financial positions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage concerns:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARNEY FRANK: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They're not the best investment these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they would be okay going forward.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Obviously that was a colossal mistake on the part of Congressman Frank. In the last quarter, Fannie Mae lost $16 billion taxpayer dollars — $16 billion in three months.
Sadly, "Talking Points" believes the same thing would happen with Obamacare. The president says it will cost a trillion dollars. Dick Morris says it will cost as much as six trillion. The truth is nobody knows, but it won't be one trillion.
The enormous cost of Obamacare is something the country simply cannot afford.
Late last Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department issued a very disturbing report. They timed it so you would not see it, but we did and here it is: The USA is now $11.5 trillion in the red. Last year the deficit rose an enormous 12 percent, the highest in history and more than double the previous yearly record.
So there is no question that the United States of America could soon become bankrupt. Obviously that would erode our power and badly damage our economy. That cannot happen. Thus Obamacare in its present form cannot happen. We don't have the money.
Speaker Pelosi says she does have the votes to pass health care reform in the House. It is likely to pass the Senate. But Politico says Mrs. Pelosi does not have the votes, and we should all pray that is true.
America is in grave danger because of financial irresponsibility on the part of our leadership. That is the truth. And while it is very difficult to watch our fellow citizens suffer without health care, the greater good must rule. The feds are spending this country into bankruptcy. It must stop.
===
RANTSTREET
Tim Blair
A mild item about books enjoyed by politicians provokes the enraged comment of the year:
Could they be any bigger bores? Julia Gillard, I’mma let you finish, but Cloudstreet is the worst novel of all time. Of. All. Time. That book was written to get on the HSC list. It’s like Winton’s retirement fund. Oh wait, he’ll never retire, he’ll keep subjecting us to the same cloying, boring novels about Australian suburbia until he dies. Because he’s so boring no one would ever kill him. It’s not like he’s going to write a ripping critique of Islam and have himself the subject of a Jihad anytime soon is it. It’s not like he’s going to move to Berlin and go on a four year long introspective nightmare under the influence of copious amounts of smack and come out the other side with an avant garde transgressive masterpiece about male prostitution and AIDS as a metaphor for the global, souless malaise humanity finds itself in.I’m sensing a certain anger.
Literature is about danger and dangerous ideas. But instead of exposing English students to those ideas we give them Tim Winton. Julia Gillard, gives them Tim Winton. Here kids, read this and become fat happy consumers. Congratulations, you’re dux of your meaningless class, take this Dymocks voucher and enjoy the new nine story supernatural romance section.
Cloudstreet. What a joke. Guess what Punch, **spoiler aler** the whole thing takes place in the three seconds or so of brain death in the mind of a time traveling foetus. Hence the 2nd person perspective. That’s why the narration has that all knowing, indigo child tone. It’s a gimmick. It’s the literary equivalent of a pop up book. It might as well have a sound chip in inside the binding that says ‘I’m Tim Winton and I’m very, very smart. So smart, you won’t understand just how deep my book is. I’m very, very smart.’
Why did you betray Australia Julia Gillard? Remember when you were young and hip and up and coming and you dug socialism and anarchism? And the Right maligned you for having that empty, austere house full of white furniture? I bet you were reading The Heart is Decitful Above All Things and pondering the difference between a ‘Veil’ and a ‘Hoax’ as described by JT LeRoy / Laura Albert.
Children of Australia - take your taxpayer funded copies of Cloudstreet and burn them before the damage to Australian literature becomes to great to ever reverse.
===
Howard nominated as ICC president
Andrew Bolt
A worthy nomination, but stand by for the vitriol:
Cricket Australia (CA) and New Zealand Cricket (NZC) today announced that they have jointly nominated John Howard as their candidate to serve as International Cricket Council (ICC) President from 2012.(Thanks to reader Joe for the video, which proves that bodies betray the dreams of even fine minds.)
===
Not Christmas for the islanders
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd has lured over so many boat people that the locals at Christmas Island are being squeezed:
IT is not the influx of asylum-seekers on Christmas Island that Andrew Gooley has grown to resent. Rather, it’s the cashed-up immigration workers who squeeze themselves on to the tiny Australian territory and push up costs.You can see why the buck stops with Kevin Rudd. My red dot on this Department of Immigration graph marks the date he revealed that the laws against boat people would be weakened:
Mr Gooley, his wife and two children will be kicked out of their rented apartment on April 13 because the new owner plans to let the property to immigration workers and service providers…
The national park gardener, who earns about $60,000 a year rehabilitating mined rainforests, said the only available unit was a flat for $550 a week, $250 a week more than he currently pays.
The local shire warned the Rudd government last November that housing was “a critical, current issue” that would get worse as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship planned to increase the island’s capacity to 2300 asylum-seekers.
The island currently has 1829 asylum-seekers and 35 crew in various forms of detention. Its capacity is 2040…
Immigration workers will soon occupy 50 rooms at the island’s mothballed casino and a block of flats recently bought by the government.
But attempts to ease congestion have not kept pace with the population surge and Mr Gooley told (Labor MP Warren) Snowdon the island was full and it was time to start processing asylum-seekers on the mainland.
“Now the island is at breaking point, the sewage treatment plant can’t cope, the power station can’t cope, the health system can’t cope, and the school can’t cope,” he wrote in his email titled, “No room for Aussies on Christmas Island”.
===
Save the planet! Stop harpooning carbon sinks
Andrew Bolt
Of all the lame excuses to unite anti-whalers and warming worriers:
A century of commercial whaling has released around 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — that’s equivalent to burning more than 50,000 square miles of temperate forest or 128,000 large sport-utility vehicles driving for 100 years.Climategate gives this news a brisk fisking.
Those are the findings of a study by U.S. scientists from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute unveiled by Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine at the Ocean Sciences meeting this week…
When a whale dies of natural causes, its body sinks to the seabed, transporting the carbon stored in it to the deep sea, away from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Harpooning one, however, can release the carbon directly into the atmosphere, thus intensifying climate change…
Whales, which Pershing says are the “forests of the ocean,” store carbon in their bodes and the gas can be released when they are killed.
(Thinks to reader Gregory.)
UPDATE
The inescapable conclusion from this study is that dead elephants should be thrown into the sea.
===
AussieTraveller is the one in a million
Andrew Bolt
After the brawl over the honors yesterday, guru Rod has combed through the data base to announce the official winner of the title of The Person Who Posted the Millionth Comment on This Blog. The winning entry:
Well, you get what you vote for. I think though that many of these ridiculous by-laws will be almost impossible to enforce.UPDATE
And as Notch wrote, if a family is fined, don’t pay it and let them take you to court and see if the judiciary is as woefully stupid as these councillors.
Pete
AussieTraveller (Reply)
Tue 02 Mar 10 (12:10pm)
AussieTraveller drops in to modestly claim his award:
Well Andrew I am honoured. But seeing as I have just returned from 4 years overseas, 3 in the States, which was the cause of me having to spend 24 hours in lockup before they sent me packing last month, and 12 months in South America, I’m thinking that for my free trip to anywhere in the world (I am assuming there is a prize for this, and a few on this blog have written that I should stay away), I’m thinking Africa for a safari, not having been to the real Africa (Egypt doesn’t quite cut it). Or maybe Antarctica.
I’m in South Yarra for a couple more days before my round Australia trip, culminating in the 50th JRTE reunion over in Perth, so I can walk into the HWT building whenever I get the call. And it’s the Philippines for 4 months after that, so any time after ANZAC Day next year for my trip will be fine.What’s that I hear you say, no free trip. Oh well, another lovely walk into town along the Yarra is quite okay too.
Pete
===
The betrayal of Europe
Andrew Bolt
From the publisher’s blurb of Theodore Dalrymple’s new book:
Dalrymple explains how European intelligentsia turned on Western civilisation and paved the way for hedonism and Islamism to run roughshod over a once proud European culture. Western Europe is in a strangely neurotic condition of being smug and terrified at the same time. On the one hand, Europeans believe they have at last created an ideal social and political system in which man can live comfortably. In many ways, things have never been better on the old continent. On the other hand, there is growing anxiety that Europe is quickly falling behind in an aggressive, globalized world. Europe is at the forefront of nothing, its demographics are rapidly transforming in unsettling ways, and the ancient threat of barbarian invasion has resurfaced in a fresh manifestation.(Via Instapundit.)
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Decline of the Age of Panic
Andrew Bolt
Bondi, Sunday morning. The place and the time that our Age of Panic finally died.
And thank God.
You see, last year we completely lost our heads, letting ourselves be convinced that if we weren’t killed by swine flu or wiped out by the worst financial catastrophe in our lives, we’d soon fry from global warming.
Never before have we had a year so dominated by phony scares and their even more disastrous rush-rush “solutions”.
What a circus of fear that was. We should blush to remember it.
But on Sunday, the day a tsunami triggered by the earthquake in Chile was meant to smash into our eastern coast, we reclaimed our senses.
Once again the experts and the politicians had ramped up the booga-booga. Beaches all along the New South Wales and Queensland coast were closed. Boaters were told to stay on land, and anglers to get off the rocks. Low-lying parts of Norfolk Island were evacuated. Sirens were sounded.
But this time people rebelled against the panic. Swimmers at Bondi refused to get out of the water, and, rather than flee for the hills, people actually came from miles around to stand on the beach to watch for the huge waves they must have known would never really come.
Gabby Stevens travelled more than 20km to the beaches our authorities were trying clear: “I wanted to see the big waves and big show, but there’s not really much happening at all.”
But if one person symbolised this glorious moment of defiance, like the lone Tiananmen Square protester standing against the Chinese tanks, it was the 23-year-old man arrested by police on the Sunshine Coast and dragged off a perfectly safe beach.
===
Takes a woman to shop a Bingle
Andrew Bolt
Brilliant! Model Lara Bingle stars in another great game of Who Flung Dung, with everyone a loser.
It starts with Brendan Fevola showing lots of mates a picture he took in 2006 of Bingle naked under a shower.
So Fevola is a bastard, and even more so since he was married during his affair with Bingle, then just 19.
Now, years later, Woman’s Day prints the picture, only lightly pixelated, for no good reason editor Fiona Connolly can think of, other than that it might sell a few more magazines.
So she’s a bastard, too. After all, her magazine boasts the picture is “embarrassing” to Bingle and “distressing” to her fiance, Test cricketer Michael Clarke, and will “put more pressure” on their relationship.
Great reasons to run it, right, Fiona?
But it’s not surprising that it took a woman to print a picture that the male editors of the Herald Sun and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph sat on for more than six months, not wanting to be so mean.
===
When the deed sounds like the faith, the faith is a problem
Andrew Bolt
You need no other information than the headline to guess the cause:
Thirteen terror suspects arrestedUPDATE
Good news, but sad it’s news at all nine long years after the September 11 attacks:
A leading Muslim scholar in Britain issued a fatwa on Tuesday condemning terrorists and suicide bombers, saying they had no justification in the name of Islam.(Thanks to reader Lin.)
Pakistan-born Dr Tahir ul-Qadri ... said his 600-page fatwa, or religious ruling, was an “absolute” condemnation of terrorism without “any excuses or pretexts”.
===
Costello stopped Turnbull, but Rudd let loose Garrett
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello says reckless Kevin Rudd failed to do what he himself did - stop a mad environment minister from running a crazy insulation scheme that was bound to fail.
Or as Costello puts it more delicately:
The death of four young men and insulation fires in 94 houses have focused attention on the competence of Peter Garrett to be a federal minister. But leaving aside his maladministration, the truth is the insulation program should never have been set up in the first place. Someone a lot more senior and a lot more sensible than Garrett should have stopped it…Such an exquisitely delivered backhand. Costello also nails the fact that Turnbull was too much like Rudd to be effectively either as an Opposition Leader or Prime Minister.
In the dying days of the Howard government, the environment department prepared a list of measures designed to reduce carbon emissions. One was to insulate houses. Back in those days, home insulation was dressed up as a climate-change policy.
I was against it. I couldn’t see why those taxpayers who had paid to insulate their own homes should subsidise insulation for those who hadn’t. The subsidy would only increase the value of a private asset - the private home.
Secondly, I could not see how the Commonwealth could hope to manage a scheme to insulate millions of homes with thousands of private contractors when it had no staff with experience to design and supervise such a scheme.
After some robust debate, the government decided against it. The taxpayers saved $2.5 billion. The then environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, would have done a better job than Garrett, but he was saved from a potential disaster.
But Costello has one more warning:
Bear this in mind. The Federal Government could not run a home insulation program. Do you think it can run every hospital and hospital department in the country?
===
Every five-year-planner’s nightmare
Andrew Bolt
Paul Kelly puts it mildly:
Rudd’s most pivotal admission was a shocker: referring to health reform, he said on ABC1’s Insiders: “We didn’t properly, I think, estimate the complexity of what we were embarking on.”
Play that again? This sounds like a government out of its depth. Labor didn’t realise how tough health and hospital reform would prove. What about tax reform, with its hidden Henry report? What about climate change, with its emissions trading scheme? What about the revival of productivity that Rudd enshrined as a goal? The pattern is recurring: announcements are made, timetables are given but policy is harder than realised. Rudd even conceded this in a generic sense, saying: “We didn’t anticipate how hard it was going to be to deliver things.” This raises the bigger question of how far such policy misjudgments run.
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