Friday, July 11, 2008

Headlines Friday 11th July

Labor hopefuls not up to snuff: Piccoli
There are claims none of the leadership-hopefuls touted as possible replacements for New South Wales premier Morris Iemma are up to the job.-not even the leaders are up to the job. - ed.
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Why we're the most gullible nation on Earth
The more Chris Smith hears about the federal government’s love affair with carbon emissions trading, the more he believes we've become the most gullible nation in the world.
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Vital service providers deserve better
The people who are essential to our daily lives are under enormous pressure, and it's no wonder we're having trouble attracting more to the job, argues Alan Jones.
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$8 a litre! Petrol price tipped for 2018
Drivers grappling with surging fuel costs are being warned they could be paying as much as eight dollars a litre for petrol within a decade. - Rudd should not be in government that long, but he promises to do this sooner. -ed.
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Putting off emissions trading would cost billions: Swan
Delaying the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) would cost Australia billions of dollars, Treasurer Wayne Swan said tonight. - this is a lie from Swan. No one knows if it will have an impact, yet, on climate change. We know it will cost billions of dollars. Maybe Swan is stepping up the rhetoric because it is clear the policy is bad. - ed.
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Column - Ties that bind
Andrew Bolt
IT WAS a funeral of the kind that hurts. The dad had died young, and his two daughters sat crying with mum in front of the coffin.

More than 400 of us sat behind them, twice as many as Louise expected.

But her friends, so many of them from her old girls school, knew it would be like that.
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Q and your As
Andrew Bolt
Well, that was frustrating. To hear so much utter nonsense talked on global warming, yet to be given bugger all time to rebut it.

I’m told I got my share of time on Q&A last night, and maybe I did. Maybe my problem is what had me hopping around and being perhaps too aggressive - that I just want the last word every time. Yet…- one noted on the program that the ALP rep and the green rep had totally bought into the lie, but the Lib rep was very level headed. - ed.
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Robert Nelson’s seven replies - and mine to him
Andrew Bolt
On Wednesday I asked Age art critic Robert Nelson seven questions about his decision to let Art Monthly Australia publish photographs of his naked daughter, then aged no more than six.

He’d given the pictures to the magazine ostensibly to defend artist Bill Henson, who’d himself been widely attacked for his own pornographic photograph of a naked 13-year-old.

Yesterday my concern about Nelson’s actions turned to alarm, when I found that in 2000 he’d described one of those very same pictures of his little girl as part of an exploration of her “eroticism”.
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Iran has finger on Photoshop trigger
Beautiful Sunset
IRAN apparently doctored photographs of missile test-firings and exaggerated the capabilities of the weapons after one failed to fire, fooling the world's media and intelligence for at least a day.
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Sex act teacher ruined my life, says student
By Phoebe Stewart
A 16-YEAR-OLD student has told how a teacher destroyed her life and sent her spiralling down a path of self-harm, after he coerced her into performing sexual acts at a Darwin park.
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Police urge Iguanagate charges
POLICE want to lay criminal charges over the Iguanagate affair - but the fate of those under scrutiny now rests with prosecutors.
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Minister 'free to call Scientologists bastards'
THE South Australian Government was at odds with the Church of Scientology last night after backing the right of a senior state minister to brand its members "bastards".

Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith has also questioned the organisation's tax-free status in comments to an anti-Scientology group called Anonymous, which it posted on popular internet site YouTube.

While declaring Dr Lomax-Smith was entitled to her opinion, a spokeswoman for Premier Mike Rann distanced the Government from the remarks, saying they represented a private view - and so the ALP fail to have a policy on the issue, but manage to represent all sides. -ed.
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Making a martyr of the Catholic church
Andrew Bolt
What a difference it makes when Catholics gather to celebrate their faith. Suddenly old news about a poor priest martyred for being gay become fresh news about another priest beast - perfect for painting the church as a vile hotbed of sexual predators.
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Mandela no Gandhi
Andrew Bolt
Alan Gold on the strange beatification of Nelson Mandela:

Since he stepped down from the leadership of a nation with rising tides of crime and infection, his legacy can be divided between the man who ended white racist rule and the failed leader who left South Africa far worse off than when he was elected.
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Iran’s picture-perfect missiles
Andrew Bolt
Any minute now, Iran could attack Israel with photographs of deadly missiles after this week’s successful “Operation Photoshop"
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Climate change delusion spreads
Andrew Bolt
The word has got out, and sufferers are being detected everywhere.
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Not a healthy change
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government’s first big health initiative is turning into a disaster:

THE Catholic Church—the nation’s biggest operator of hospitals after state governments—has warned Kevin Rudd that his move to lift Medicare surcharge levy thresholds will hammer the battlers he wants to help by choking already stressed public wards and lengthening surgical waiting lists.

In a devastating critique of one of the Prime Minister’s main 2008-09 budget initiatives, Catholic Health Australia has used government data to warn the change will lump public hospitals with a $400 million burden of providing an extra 200,000 procedures in the next 12 months...
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No, he didn’t, and yes he did
Andrew Bolt
From a Sydney Morning Herald editorial claiming the Opposition is in a ”complete muddle” on emissions trading:

Professor Garnaut’s recent report did not say Australia should go it alone on emissions trading…

Yes, Professor Garnaut does expect Australia, as a large per-capita polluter, to set an example by introducing an emissions trading scheme.

Er, could the writer of this muddle explain how we could “set an example” without “going it alone”?
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All the price rise Rudd could ever want
Andrew Bolt
Oh, really?

PETROL could hit $8 a litre within a decade as oil production begins to dwindle and demand continues to soar, a CSIRO study to be released today says.

The CSIRO is now into peak oil theory, too. Very well, then if this outfit of global warming preachers is right, isn’t this all the price signal motorists need to swtich to less gassy alternatives? So what on earth is the sense in this:

Labor is set to introduce an emissions trading scheme in 2010, which the report estimates will cost between 10 cents and 25 cents extra for a litre of petrol.

With petrol already predicted to rise by more than $6, all that the Government’s extra 25 cent ETS slug will do is raise more taxes.
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Flannery doesn’t want to know
Andrew Bolt
The Green politician and green scientist I tangled with aren’t the only warming preachers so seem utterly unaware of one of the most basic - but inconvenient - facts. Here’s Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery taking talkback on ABC radio on Monday:

Caller Christopher: Chris Kenny pointed out in the ‘Tiser yesterday that global average temperatures have fallen since 1998. I’m wondering if your speaker can comment on that?

Flannery: I don’t know if that’s correct or not but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true: 1998 was an extremely hot year where we had a real spike in global temperatures brought about by that El Nino phase. Since then, temperatures have been high but they haven’t reached that extreme point that we had in ‘98.

I said to the equally ignorant Milne on Q&A last night: If you don’t know that, what do you know?
NASA GW figures 1999
1999 data used by NASA, later bodgied.-ed.
NASA GW figures 2007
2007 data used by NASA, bodgied since 1999.-ed.
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Making a martyr of the Catholic church
Andrew Bolt
What a difference it makes when Catholics gather to celebrate their faith. Suddenly old news about a poor priest martyred for being gay become fresh news about another priest beast - perfect for painting the church as a vile hotbed of sexual predators.

Old news: The Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr on January 29, 2005
AS two men swam at Cronulla on a hot night 23 years ago, one fondled the other in the dark… The law in NSW was about to change ... but when these men had their one-night stand in the presbytery of St Catherine Laboure Church at Gymea, each was committing an “indecent assault” that might land them in jail for five years. Consent was no defence.

In September 2003 the police came for Father Terry Goodall at his Penshurst parish and arrested him for having sex with the teacher all those years ago. Judge Philip Bell, of the NSW District Court, remarked that on the facts before him, “you’d never get a conviction if you ran this trial today”, but under the old law Goodall had no choice but to plead guilty. Having sex with a man was enough to convict him. He was sentenced last week. In 2002 the victim formally complained to the church of sexual assault, and the Herald understands he sought $100,000 compensation. The then archbishop George Pell wrote offering his sympathy and promised to discipline the priest, but told the teacher: “I cannot be reasonably satisfied that abusive and criminal behaviour were involved.” Twenty-two years down the track - after being investigated first by the church and then by the police, after being dismissed from his parish and humiliated in the court - Goodall was sentenced to a few seconds’ imprisonment...


New news: The Sydney Morning Herald vilifies Cardinal Pell on the eve of World Youth Day, 2008:
IT IS difficult to understand Cardinal George Pell’s inept handling of allegations of child sexual abuse against Sydney priest Father Terence Goodall. The latest furore can be dated from 2003. In January of that year, Cardinal Pell received an independent investigator’s report supporting claims by two men that they had been assaulted many years earlier by Father Goodall. On February 14, Cardinal Pell wrote to one victim accepting his claim. On the same day, however, he wrote to the other victim - Anthony Jones, of Lismore - saying his claim could not be substantiated because no other victims had been found. Cardinal Pell now concedes his letter rejecting Mr Jones’s claim was “badly worded and a mistake"…

Cardinal Pell denies any deliberate cover-up, but that is likely to be of no comfort to Mr Jones, who says the cardinal’s handling of the case has destroyed his religious faith… (T)he Anthony Jones case - revealed only now by the ABC’s Lateline program - raises serious questions about the quality of the justice being done behind closed doors.

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