LITTLE DAN FOOTBALLS
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 31, 11 (05:14 am)
Seven years after CBS and Dan Rather were busted for airing fake memos about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, someone is making excuses: “In the case of the fake memos, CBS News wasn’t pushing something theyknew to be false.”
That someone is reborn leftoid Charles Johnson, whose involvement in the case helped bring down Rather. He seems to regret it. As Daedalus reports:
Charles is now distancing himself … he is disavowing his role …
Charles Johnson, you are the new Dan Rather.
460 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S LEEK TAX
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (11:32 pm)
Interestingly, a proposed carbon tax also looms in Julia Gillard’s native Wales. Note which UK party opposes it:
Labour warned that carbon tax plans in last week’s Budget had jeopardised jobs and investment in Welsh steel production.
Locally, we’ve seen another outbreak of carbon tax hatecrime:
Vandals scrawled anti-carbon tax graffiti across Lindsay federal Labor MP David Bradbury’s office this week.
Mr Bradbury said he understood that many people felt passionate about the issue, but that there was no excuse for vandalism.
‘‘I have never condoned vandalism of any kind,’’ he said.
‘‘I think it’s a great shame that some people think this is an appropriate way to make a political point.’’
Agreed; it is inappropriate and cannot be condoned. But the intriguing thing is the nature of the graffiti. There are no obscenities, nor any threats. There are just two words: carbon tax.
FIONA BYRNED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (08:03 pm)
Marrickville’s anti-Israel candidate loses:
Former deputy premier Carmel Tebbutt has claimed victory for the ALP in the inner-Sydney seat of Marrickville.
Pre-election opinion polls indicated NSW Greens candidate Fiona Byrne would steal the seat but a day later the result was too close to call.
Today Ms Tebbutt claimed that “Marrickville has defied political gravity to remain Labor”.
The three-way battle for Balmain continues, as do Liberal v Labor fights in Newcastle and Swansea.
POLEYS STRESSED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (01:32 pm)
Official government frightmonkey Tim Flannery in 2006:
Key lines:
• “Polar bears are under enormous stress. I honestly do not think that we’ll have wild polar bears on this earth in 30 years time.”
• “Right now it’s about the warmest the planet’s ever been for the last million-odd years.”
• “The old dinosaur fossil fuel industries are investing enormously to try to make sure they get their way. I think that it’s a lobby group who’s operating there at this critical juncture to try to mislead Canadians.”
OBOMBER STRIKES
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (01:31 pm)
Readers who selected Before Thursday, April 14 in the Gaddafi Death Poll might be close to the mark.
Locust Smith calls for fewer insects
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 31, 11 (06:37 am)
Dick Smith is just another green authoritarian with a dangerous contempt for humanity:
EVERY Australian family should be limited to just two children to curb the population explosion, millionaire Dick Smith said yesterday.
He called for a China-like quota on the number of kids, warning the growing burden on our resources was like “a plague of locusts"…
“I don’t see it by force. I see it by saying to parents, ‘It’s best to have two kids’...”
Two things about Smith, though. If the “burden on our resources” is a problem, this frequent-flying global warming worrier might use a little less than he currently hogs:
HE has a holiday house, a farm with a homestead, a large house with a swimming pool, two cars, a steam train and all that owning three separate households entail. He’s very open, but for some reason refuses to confirm just how many aircraft he owns; there are at least two helicopters and a jet.
Second, he might try to convince his green friends to drop some of the real restrictions on our prosperity and well-being - restrictions that actually make population growth a bigger problem than it need be:
We can bring in more people than Dick Smith and the Greens say, but not while people like them stop us from preparing all the dams, power plants, land divisions and roads we’ll need to keep us all comfy.
Not while they also refuse to let us even talk about excluding those likely to have trouble fitting in.
But we can also bring in fewer people as the Laheys and other business spruikers say, but not until we use our brains to become more inventive and productive than we lazily tolerate today in this new Land of No.
What Labor has invited with its “compassion”
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 31, 11 (06:27 am)
And surely even those who once cheered Labor’s more “compassionate” policies must admit they’ve brought unfortunate - and uncompassionate - outcomes, including record numbers of people in detention:
Another boat, carrying 37 asylum seekers, was intercepted yesterday and will be taken to Christmas Island, the first since riots broke out this month.
Refugee advocates said yesterday a man held at the Curtin detention centre was in hospital after trying to hang himself.
A 20-year-old Afghan man took his life at the same centre on Monday, and another 20-year-old Afghan committed suicide at the Scherger centre in Queensland a fortnight ago.
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison is right:
What we are seeing in the absolute mess and misery of our detention network - of those who are drowning at sea, or crashing against rocks at Christmas Island, or those who are wasting in camps as group after group come … I don’t accept that as a morally acceptable outcome.
How can so many people be too sick to work?
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 31, 11 (06:16 am)
Some of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s ideas to get more people off benefits and back to work strike me as too expensive, too socially regressive, too much the squeezing of the toothpaste tube and too much of a reward to people for doing no more than what we should expect:
At the last election, the Coalition proposed a job commitment bonus scheme for long-term unemployed people under 30 who found a job and kept it,,, (and a) commitment to a paid parental leave scheme giving most mothers six months with their babies at full pay.
Another important policy that the Liberal and National parties took to the election was an incentive payment for employers who hired welfare-dependent people over 50.
But other ideas seem valuable:
(The Coalition has promised) a relocation allowance for young people who moved to take a job and who agreed not to return to welfare within six months. ..
Here are four further economic reforms that even this government should not shrink from:
- Making Work for the Dole mandatory for people under 50 and receiving unemployment benefits for more than six months.- Quarantining to the necessities of life half the welfare income of all long-term unemployed people.
- Creating a new benefit for people whose disabilities can readily be treated.
- Suspending the payment of unemployment benefits in places where there are unfilled, unskilled jobs.
I didn’t realise how much standards had slipped:
The government vowed to retain Work for the Dole at the 2007 election but has since deliberately allowed it to decay… Since 2007, Work for the Dole participation has fallen by 60 per cent to less than 10,000. Work for the Dole should be the default option for everyone under 50 who has been on unemployment benefits for more than six months.
And disability payments now seem to go to an extraordinary number of people who seem extraordinarily incurable:
Australian disability pension numbers are set to pass 800,000 this year at an annual cost of $13 billion. That’s about 220,000 more working-age people on the disability pension than on unemployment benefits.
With just more than 1 per cent of disability pensioners moving back into the workforce every year and with nearly 60 per cent of recipients having potentially treatable mental health or muscular-skeletal conditions, a reform of this type should be considered here.
A valuable debate,
Not a Noble Prize
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 31, 11 (06:08 am)
Even Barack Obama knows his Nobel Peace Prize was given for purely political reasons - in fact, by as few as two far-Left activists:
US President Barack Obama poked fun at himself overnight for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he lauded Energy Secretary Steven Chu for being honoured with his own.
”Chu has the Nobel Prize in physics - he actually deserved his Nobel Prize,” Mr Obama said during a speech on US energy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
A greater man would have refused such an award that so demeaned itself.
Don’t talk to us about your centre, says East Timor
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 31, 11 (05:51 am)
How did Julia Gillard come to promise last year that she would build a detention centre in a country that still refuses to agree to it?
AUSTRALIA’S plan for a regional refugee processing centre in East Timor has been dealt a crippling blow, with the head of Timor’s delegation to the Bali people-smuggling summit rejecting Labor’s bid for one-on-one talks about the controversial proposal…
“For us, it’s better to take a regional discussion because this is a regional issue,” (Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Alberto) Carlos told The Australian. “It’s broader, wider than a bilateral issue.”
Mr Carlos was downbeat about the chances of establishing the centre, saying his country had more pressing problems and was not a suitable location....
“A lot of infrastructure needs to be built, so that’s our main priority”.
But as ministers and delegates began leaving the two-day talks, the Gillard government secured a minor victory after members of the Bali summit agreed to consider the possibility of establishing a “centre or centres” somewhere in the region to process asylum claims.
What a farce.
UPDATE
Greg Sheridan says the Government should stop embarrassing itself:
THE Bali meeting has ended in complete failure and humiliation for Julia Gillard’s proposed regional processing centre in East Timor.
The vaguest reference in the meeting’s communique to the possibility of a centre or centres in some unknown place, at some unknown time, for some undefined purpose in the distant future was the best Australian diplomacy could do by way of a fig leaf to cover its shocking policy nakedness…
The East Timorese have never agreed to the idea and repeatedly rebuffed it.
But the federal government, and especially the hapless Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, keep verballing the East Timorese and pretending that it is a live option…
The East Timor processing centre only ever had one purpose - to get Gillard through the last election, to look as though the government had some positive ideas about how to stop illegal immigrants coming to Australia by boat, when in fact it had no idea.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd deserves a special meritorious service award for refusing, in almost all circumstances, ever to mention the ludicrous idea to anybody.
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