Headlines Sunday 8th March 2009

Pacific Brands pays $500,000 to sponsor Melbourne Fashion Festival
Pacific Brands workers facing redundancy are furious the company is splashing out half a million dollars on a Melbourne fashion festival.
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Emergency services brace for category five Cyclone Hamish
Emergency services personnel are being deployed from all around Queensland to deal with category five tropical cyclone Hamish as it creeps towards the Whitsunday Islands.
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Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad resigns
Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad has resigned from his post to pave the way for the formation of a national unity government, his office said.
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Manly may stand down Brett Stewart over sexual assault claims
Manly may stand down Brett Stewart and the NRL may pull his advertising campaign, following sexual assault claims against the star fullback.
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Cyclone Hamish could mirror Larry's devastation: Bligh
Car bomb kills 11 in Pakistan: police
Melbourne tremor one of three to hit Australia in one day
Morgan Tsvangirai's wife dies in car crash
Guantanamo 'worse since Obama elected'
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Buttrose drug arrest has A-list nervous
PROMINENT people may be implicated in the ongoing police drugs investigation of Ita Buttrose's nephew.
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NRL ads halted after sex assault claim
MANLY may stand down Brett Stewart and the NRL have suspended ads starring him after sexual assault allegations.
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Dying reality TV star christened with sons
TERMINALLY-ill reality television star Jade Goody was christened with her two young sons yesterday in a service at the London hospital where she is being treated, her publicist said.
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Turnbull brevity beats rambling Rudd
Piers Akerman
THE battle between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has - until now - been lopsided.
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WORD WORK
Tim Blair
Nothing involving the combined powers of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden could ever go wrong:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in greeting Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, presented him with a red plastic button emblazoned with the English word “reset” and the Russian word “peregruzka.”

The gift was a play on Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s call in Munich last month for the two countries to “press the reset button” on their relationship.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Mrs. Clinton said, handing the button to Mr. Lavrov. “Do you think we got it?”

“You got it wrong,” he replied, explaining that the Americans had come up with the Russian word for overcharged.
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POST VAPORISED
Tim Blair
The Lancet reports:
People in Gaza described a silent bomb which is extremely destructive. The bomb arrives as a silent projectile at most with a whistling sound and creates a large area where all objects and living things are vaporized with minimal trace. We are unable to fit this into conventional weapons but the possibility of new particle weapons being tested should be suspected. ?
The Lancet retracts:
We have taken down the blog post “The wounds of Gaza” because of factual inaccuracies.
UPDATE. Lancet-like logic from Roseanne Barr.
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The real plastic turkey
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, March 08, 09 (11:05 am)
(Still on that magic button .. ed)
Imagine the sneering if George Bush has made such an elementary howler ..
Any other important buttons around the fingers of the Obama administration that need their labels corrected?

“Er, sir? That “lunch” button you pressed actually has a missing ‘a’.”
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The Pacific Brands state
Andrew Bolt
Victoria sliding fastest, and not just because of the credit crisis:

Treasurer John Lenders last year assured Victorians that the economy was robust, but new jobs started to drop away rapidly from July, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force surveys…

In December, the state went into negative territory, with 5400 fewer jobs in December 2008 compared to December 2007. Victoria was the only state to lose jobs in 2008…

Labour economists point to a double-barrel assault on Victoria’s employment: the global downturn and a long-term loss of manufacturing jobs to developing countries such as China, where workers are paid less and companies can produce goods cheaply.
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Batty priorities
Andrew Bolt
What a shame Kevin Rudd will have spent all our money - and more - on pink batts, free cash handouts and public housing instead:

AUSTRALIA is facing a looming transport crisis with highways and arterial roads set to be choked with thousands of extra cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles....The report by the federally funded Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics predicts Australians will be driving 55.8 billion kilometres a year on the non-urban part of the national road network by 2030 — 50 per cent further than now… Average daily traffic levels on the roads connecting Melbourne with regional centres will increase 57 per cent by 2030.
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Keating savages Obama’s “fool”
Andrew Bolt
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has a problem with Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. He’s the ”gigantic fool” who helped to create the “greatest mess” the .
IMF ever made.
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It’s the hypocrisy, Glenn
Andrew Bolt
Glenn Milne attacks Malcolm Turnbull for what he in fact did not do:

WHAT on earth is Malcolm Turnbull thinking?

As jobs burn all over the Australian landscape, as doubts emerge over whether the Government’s “cash splash” has done anything more than plunge Australia into deficit for the coming decade and burden the next generation with debt for nought, Turnbull does what?

He attacks not only Kevin Rudd, but Rudd’s admirably independent and successful wife, Therese Rein, for being rich.

False. Turnbull actually praised Rein:
I congratulate the Rudds, especially Therese Rein, on their success.

He merely made the utterly reasonable point that Rudd is a hypocrite to mock Turnbull for being rich, and to suddenly attack the “neo liberalism” that has so benefited his own family:

But what are we to think of the wealthiest Prime Minister Australia has ever had, a man greatly enriched by the privatisation and outsourcing of government services, standing up again and again to denounce the very policies from which he and his family have profited so extensively. It is more than a bit rich. It is as hypocritical, as chutzpadik, as his essay is absurd.

And to underline Rudd’s hypocrisy, here’s Milne’s own news story today:
THERESE Rein, the wife of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, earned at least $1.4m last year, almost $1m of which came from share bonuses from her company, Ingeus.

That means Rein earns around the same as Sue Morphett, the head of Pacific Brands and a target of a vicious smear campaign from the Rudd Government and the ACTU, which called her wage ”obscene”.
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The kind of hero Obama’s Democrats love best
Andrew Bolt
Name this statesman and hero, who has become a feted advisor to the Barack Obama administration:

(Mr X) became the second member of (his team) to talk to Obama about policy…

(Mr X) was promoting his plan to create safe, cheap “green housing” in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans as a national model… He held separate meetings with Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Steven Chu, Energy Secretary, before being feted as a “hero” by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, on Capitol Hill.

Is Mr X:

A. Soldier statesman John McCain.

B. General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf

C. Former Secretary of State and war general Colin Powell

D. General David Petraeus, war-winning architect of the Iraq surge.

E. Actor Brad Pitt.
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Feed the hungry. Crank up your thermostat
Andrew Bolt
ABC radio says at least there’ll be plenty to eat at Armageddon:

Research carried out by the Department of Primary Industries in Victoria has shown that wheat crop yields could jump by up to 20 per cent under global warming.

UPDATE

Witchhunters, attack! Yet another heretic has been detected in our universities, years after newspapers declared the global warming debate “over”. This time it’s Dr Kesten Green of Monash University, who can expect a sliming for co-authoring this, with Professor Scott Armstrong of Pennsylvania University and Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:


Why rush to ruin the economy over some dodgy forecasts?… Consider the historical record. The tiny fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased through the twentieth century. And yet, during that time, global average temperatures rose till about 1940, fell till about 1975, rose again till 1998, and then dropped away again. It is not surprising, then, that despite claims “the science is settled,” thousands of scientists disagree with forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming…

Thus, the first question a bona fide forecaster would ask is: Can we do better than assume future temperatures will be the same as current temperatures?

The forecasting model based on this assumption is called the “no-change” model, and studies have shown it is often difficult to beat. The model predicts that global average temperatures in each of the next 100 years will be the same as the previous year’s temperature.

When this model is applied, starting in the year 1850, the differences between the forecasts and global temperature measurements turn out to be quite small. For example, for temperature forecasts for 20 years in the future, the average difference turns out to be 0.18°C (0.32°F). For forecasts for 50 years into the future, the average error was 0.24°C (0.43°F).

These are temperature differences that a normal human being would have trouble detecting and are well within the range of natural variation. The evidence clearly suggests that the no-change model is the obvious one for public policy makers to use.

Policymakers, however, have tended to defer to the projections of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… But how do the IPCC projections perform?

The IPCC first projected a global warming rate of 0.03°C per year in 1992. The errors of the IPCC projection over the years 1992 to 2008 were little different from the errors from the no-change model, when compared to actual measured temperature changes. When the IPCC’s warming rate is applied to a historical period of exponential CO2 growth, from 1851 to 1975, the errors are more than seven times greater than errors from the no-change model.
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Too much even for Lancet, after all
Andrew Bolt
I linked last month to a bizarre post on Lancet’s Global Health Journal by two British surgeons adocating we hire soldiers to fight Israel:
The people of Gaza are extremely vulnerable and defenseless in the event of another attack. If the International Community is serious about preventing such a large scale of deaths and injuries in the future, it will have to develop a some sort of defense force for Gaza.

This article, which remained on line for a month, also described - among other wild things - an evil Israeli weapon not known to science:


People in Gaza described a silent bomb which is extremely destructive. The bomb arrives as a silent projectile at most with a whistling sound and creates a large area where all objects and living things are vaporized with minimal trace. We are unable to fit this into conventional weapons but the possibility of new particle weapons being tested should be suspected.

Lancet now publishes a retraction, which contains another unbelievable claim:

We have taken down the blog post “The wounds of Gaza” because of factual inaccuracies. We would like to point out that our editorial decision process to post blog entries (and their comments) on The Lancet Global Health Network is very different from our rigorous peer review process in The Lancet and TheLancet.com. We want to encourage debate and we see The Lancet Global Health Network as a good forum to do this. We do not endorse any particular side of a debate and so post a range of views and comments.
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I’d be suspicious, too
Andrew Bolt
It will seem symbolically true, even if it turns out not to be literally so:

ZIMBABWE’S Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was injured and his wife Susan was killed in a car crash late on Friday, party officials confirmed, adding that suspicious circumstances could indicate foul play…

Officials from Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who asked not to be named said his car was hit by the trailer of a heavy truck that swung out into the middle of the road when the two vehicles passed each other…

President Robert Mugabe’s former regime has a long history of assassination plots, mass murder and torture of its opponents since it came to power in 1980…

Eddie Cross, a member of the MDC executive… said an early investigation team sent to the spot immediately after the accident occurred reported that the front left tyre had had a blowout. “They were taking videos and pictures and then the police came and arrested them, and took their videos and pictures,” he said. “We don’t like that.”
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Rudd’s audience grows restless
Andrew Bolt
A Sydney Morning Herald report detects a growing resistance to Kevin Rudd’s spin:

“WHAT the?” Those two words fairly sum up the reaction of Sydney small business representatives at yesterday’s luncheon address by the Prime Minister.

Over the course of 35 sleepy minutes, Kevin Rudd, speaking as a guest of the NSW Chamber of Commerce at a luncheon at the Hilton Hotel, glossed the history of the credit crunch, called for an end to “financial nationalism”, and offered the repeated refrain “we’re all in this together"…

“I thought it was odd, there was nothing new,” said another businessman who declined to give his name. “It was all spin and no substance.”

Bemusement turned to agitation when, at the speech’s conclusion, Mr Rudd sat down without taking questions… Terry Oakes-Ash, from the Southern Highlands, was so angered that the floor was refused a voice he confronted the Prime Minister.

“I’ve heard this speech four times now and it’s boring,” he said. “The NSW Chamber was directed that there would be no questions, and everyone I’ve spoken to is pissed off.”

A year ago there was a rather different market for mere spin:

An apology to the stolen generation was greeted with thunderous applause at a live broadcast in central Sydney today.

There’s even a change in the weather at the 7.30 Report
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Cooperating at each other’s throats
Andrew Bolt
So how’s Kevin Rudd’s new era of “cooperative federalism” going? Here’s this past month’s news:
- SA Premier Mike Rann is preparing a legal challenge to force Victoria to allow more water to flow to the Murray’s depleted lower reaches.


- THE Federal Government has docked NSW almost $50 million in funding as punishment for the Rees Government cutting back its commitment to help upgrade the notorious Pacific Highway.

- THE $500 million Murray River water buyback deal that secured senator Nick Xenophon’s vote for the Rudd Government’s $42billion fiscal stimulus package will be stymied by Victoria’s refusal to lift a cap on how much water can be sold.

- THE debate over who should run the health system has reignited calls for the Rudd Government to act on its election promise to assume control of public hospitals if the states do not improve their performance by the middle of the year… Yesterday the Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, reaffirmed the Federal Government’s promise to hold a referendum on whether or not Canberra should take over public hospitals after the final NHHRC recommendations are tabled midyear.

Haven’t seen so much cooperation since the last Middle East peace talks.
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Too Christian for charity?
Andrew Bolt
Miranda Devine is astonished that the Victorian Government should lock the Salvos out of its Bushfire Appeal Fund:

In the case of the Victorian fires, the more secular Red Cross, headed by the former Labor federal minister Robert Tickner, and staffed by various former Labor-affiliated or union people, has become the Government’s charity of choice. Early on in the tragedy, the federal and state Labor governments abandoned protocol and singled out the Red Cross as their official “partner”, committed to paying all its administration costs, and gave the impression it was the only charity operating.

The Salvation Army, despite having raised more than $16 million for victims, of which it has already distributed one-third, has now been excluded from the panel which is managing the bushfire donations. The Red Cross is the only charity on the Victorian Bushfire Appeal Fund Advisory Panel, chaired by the former Victorian governor John Landy, which will decide how to distribute $200 million in donations.

“We’ve been completely frozen out,” said a Salvation Army source…

“The Red Cross has basically become a de-facto arm of the Labor Federal Government. They’re using it as a PR vehicle … The fact that the Government have not included Salvos in any formal way with this disaster is a slap in the face to the many thousands of companies and members of the public who have donated to us.”

A Salvation Army spokesman, Major Neil Venables, said two weeks ago that he hoped the organisation’s “Christian orientation” and perceived closeness to the previous government is not behind the freeze-out.
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NSW sick: wards shut
Andrew Bolt
If the farcically incompetent NSW Government could also cancel illness, this might not be such a problem:

BED numbers have been slashed this week at Sydney’s biggest hospital, in a round of ward closures aimed at reining in a $70 million blow-out in the region’s health spending.

Ten of 16 operating suites have been closed and elective surgery has been cancelled, with staff forced to take leave, sources said. Forty-three cardiology and heart surgery beds have shut since late last year, said medical and nursing staff, culminating last week in the closure without notice of the heart surgery ward - which staff found empty and locked when they arrived for work.

Will no one rid voters of this troublesome pack of bunglers?
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Killer untrained
Andrew Bolt
It’s almost as if VCAT is demanding the killer be a cabbie:

A KILLER granted the right to drive taxis had not completed the necessary training when a tribunal decided to accredit him, it has emerged. The Supreme Court heard the cabbie - known only as XFJ - still hasn’t completed the official driver education course…

Several court orders prevent the Herald Sun naming the killer, who repeatedly stabbed his wife in the head and stomach in a frenzied attack in 1990. A jury acquitted him of murder on the ground of insanity, and he was detained in a psychiatric institution until his release 10 years ago.