Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Headlines Tuesday 18th November

Portrait of partisan ABC
Piers Akerman
INEVITABLY, many viewers of the first episode of The Howard Years will make comparisons with the ABC’s 1993 program, Labor in Power. - Although the fact that both became PM seems to suggest comparison, there is no comparing. Last week Rudd’s defenders went to an interview with Mr Howard criticizing Obama’s take on the Iraq war and the war on terror. Mr Howard correctly labeled the intellectually lazy Obama publicly for the kind of rhetoric Obama was producing .. something Obama cannot (responsibly) do once he attains office. On the other hand, Rudd seems to have lied about a private conversation to a member of the press so as to bignote himself and maintain his rhetoric belittling the US President.
Bishop’s interview with Oakes included the reference of Latham to President Bush. Latham’s typically vitriolic comment was substantively similar to Rudd’s, but not Howard’s.
Rudd’s appalling diplomatic judgement and his ignorance regarding how an economy works spells disaster for Australia that will take years of blaming the Liberals by the ABC to balance. - ed.

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A few burgers, but no bed
Andrew Bolt
Hmm. Put this way, it does seem on the skinny side:

Nowhere is his message more relevant than Australia, where the unemployed receive a starvation wage of $224.65 a week… Both sides of politics have forced people who lose their jobs to live on just $32 a day, when even pensioners get $40 and the average full-time wage is $170 a day. - I’m 17 months unemployed and at age 41 unlikely to get work soon. The only way I could afford to be unemployed this long is through having eaten out all of my savings including home loan equity. Come Christmas I will be broke.
Thing is I have a master’s degree in my profession and had a secure public service job. But I felt compelled to leave it after harassment from small office politics ballooned, with political help, into the death of a school child (not my fault) and the bungling of a pedophile investigation (I’m blameless there too).
I resigned and told the minister responsible I would tell the press what had happened. It surprised me when I found the press didn’t have to report it.
I understand that the NSW Senate will discuss my issue when some questions are asked about my case sometime soon. Big thanks to Australian Business Party Joseph Adams for his help, and the Liberals for theirs .. I support them, but don’t live in a Liberal neighborhood. - ed.

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Australia is pretty
Andrew Bolt

The first, rushed reviews for Baz Luhrmann’s Australia are out.
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No private justice, please
Andrew Bolt
This time I think Marilyn Warren is right:

VICTORIA’S two most senior judges have delivered an extraordinary rebuke to the state’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Jeremy Rapke, QC, accusing him of endangering the fairness of the criminal justice system. The chiefs of the Supreme and the County Court have both taken aim at Mr Rapke over his professed habit of telephoning judges and counselling them over their “insensitive” remarks towards victims of crime.
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Give NSW to Kennett
Andrew Bolt
NSW is sure a basket case if even Jeff Kennett agrees it’s a bigger disaster than the one he inherited from Joan Kirner:

JEFF Kennett believes NSW is in worse shape than the debt-ridden “rustbelt” he inherited in Victoria, and warns that any revival in the nation’s biggest state will take at least five years to complete.

And Kennett knows who to blame, too - Bob Carr, who set the pattern for modern Labor leaders
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Big government is back
Andrew Bolt
Is the financial crisis becoming an excuse to reinvent and reintroduce socialism?
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Clogging the net filter
Andrew Bolt
Jack the Insider warns that the compulsory net filter the Rudd Government plans to introduce will hurt more than help:

The major problem is ISP filtering will slow down the web to all Australians by as much as 60 per cent, depending on the sophistication of the filtering program that your ISP has in place. Australia has one of the slowest broadband delivery systems in the OECD and if Conroy has his way, it’s going to get a lot slower.
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Bush counts just 19 leaders in the G20
Andrew Bolt
Prime Blabber Kevin Rudd claimed he was the one who told that idiot George Bush what the G20 was.

Guess he either didn’t do a good job, or else Bush took mighty offence at being lied about. The G20 is a meeting of 20 leading economies, but the White House media site shows individual pictures of Bush meeting the leaders of just 18 of the other 19 G20 countries at last weekend’s meeting.

One - and only one - of all the leaders missed out on a picture in Bush’s gallery. A blabber was heard, and now is not seen.
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The endangered animal was the one in their bun
Andrew Bolt
McDonald’s Happy Meal isn’t so happy when the kids are warned mid-bite that other animals - no, not the ones they’re actually eating - are endangered. It’s even less happy when McDonald’s has the hide to claim that fluffy wuffy kangaroos, cute elephants and lovable pandas are those close to extinction. Do they really expect the kids to swallow that?
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Save planet, not passengers
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government is giving car makers $3.4 billion under a scheme to build a safer car. But “safer” means safer for the planet, not for people:

Participants in the Automotive Transformation Scheme will be required to demonstrate that they are aiming for better environmental outcomes...
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Haven’t they got better things to do?
Andrew Bolt
Offence is now a tradable commodity:

AN Aboriginal group plans to sue the Victorian Government for ignoring its heritage in the renaming of Mount Niggerhead, a mountain in the Alpine National Park.
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Russia better freeze those plans
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
Peter Wilson worries about a lack of ice in the Arctic:
THE melting of the Arctic ice cap has created an awkward new threat to international climate change talks by convincing senior officials in Moscow that Russia stands to reap an economic bonanza from ice-free northern oceans.Sightings of exhausted polar bears swimming in waters that were once thick with ice floes have fuelled calls for more urgent action on climate change...

But which bit of Arctic water “once thick with ice floes” does he have in mind?
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Bush’s victory
Andrew Bolt

Iraq - before the surge and now.
UPDATE

Edward Luttwak says Iraq is not the full measure of George Bush’s triumph:
Of course, the Bush victory has not yet been recognised, which is very odd indeed because it has all happened in full view.

Until 9/11, Islamic militants, including violent jihadists of every sort, from al Qaeda to purely local outfits, enjoyed much public support—either overt or tacit—across most of the Muslim world. From Morocco to Indonesia, governments appeased militants at home while encouraging them to focus their violent activities abroad…

All this came to an abrupt end after 9/11. Sophisticates everywhere ridiculed the uncompromising Bush stance, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” as a cowboy stunt, but it was swiftly successful. Governments across the Muslim world quickly changed their conduct…

In different ways, other governments in Muslim countries all the way to Indonesia also took their stand with Bush and the US against the jihadists, even though jihad against the infidel is widely regarded as an Islamic duty. Suddenly, active Islamists and violent jihadists suffered a catastrophic loss of status. Instead of being admired, respected or at least tolerated, they had to hide, flee or give it up. Numbers started to shrink. The number of terrorist incidents outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq keeps going down…

Yet one hears well-informed people casually remark that Bush’s war on terror has been a total failure.... But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to recall that 11th September was meant to be the beginning of a global jihad, with a 12th September, 13th September, 14th September and so on… Instead, the global jihadi mobilisation, triggered by post-9/11 enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden, was stopped before it could gain any momentum by all that Bush set in motion: the destruction of al Qaeda training bases in Afghanistan, the killing or capture of most of its operatives, and, most importantly, the conversion of Muslim governments from the support of jihad to its repression.
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Mal surprisingly surpises AAP
Andrew Bolt
AAP is surely kidding:

Kevin Rudd has received praise for his first year as prime minister from an unexpected quarter.
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Give NSW to Kennett
Andrew Bolt
NSW is sure a basket case if even Jeff Kennett agrees it’s a bigger disaster than the one he inherited from Joan Kirner:

JEFF Kennett believes NSW is in worse shape than the debt-ridden “rustbelt” he inherited in Victoria, and warns that any revival in the nation’s biggest state will take at least five years to complete.

And Kennett knows who to blame, too - Bob Carr, who set the pattern for modern Labor leaders:

“Bob was about appeasement and re-election,” Mr Kennett said. “Bob set about a culture that was politically criminal. I get cross at Bob Carr that he ... misused 10 years of public office and so totally failed to do what I consider to be the right thing.”

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