from Crikey .....

Senator Milne: a few stings in the tail of the boring budget

Greens Senator Christine Milne writes:

In his book, “Heaven + Earth. Global warming: the missing science”, Professor Ian Plimer from the University of Adelaide questions the science of human-induced climate change. A range of Australian scientists respond to the book.

But first a word from Gus.

I find it quite extraordinary that a serious scientist, atheist and sceptic, would use the word "heaven" in the title of his work. It's perverse. Being a miner as well as a professor, Ian Plimer would have massive conflict of interests should he subscribe to the "global warming" theory. Thus he does not.

TONY Abbott is under pressure to justify a claim to primary school students that it was considerably warmer when Jesus was alive than it is today.

The Opposition Leader urged year 5 and 6 students at Trinity Gardens Primary School in Adelaide to be sceptical about the human contribution to climate change, saying it was an open question.

During a question-and-answer session on Friday, Mr Abbott said that it was warmer ''at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth'' than now.

When Pope John Paul II was still living in Poland as Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, he claimed that the security police would accuse priests of sexual abuse just to hassle and discredit them. (New York Times, 3/28/10). For Wojtyła, the Polish pedophilia problem was nothing more than a Communist plot to smear the church.

By the early 1980s, Wojtyła, now ensconced in Rome as Pope John Paul II, treated all stories about pedophile clergy with dismissive aplomb, as little more than slander directed against the church. That remained his stance for the next twenty years.

More than one unwitting visitor to Jerusalem has fallen prey to the bizarre delusion that they are the Messiah. Usually, they are whisked off to the serene surroundings of Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city, where they are gently nursed back to health.

It is an interesting irony that the patients at Kfar Shaul recuperate from such variations on amnesia on the very spot that Israel has sought to erase from its collective memory.

If a Jewish state were run by the secret police, Israelis could disappear without a trace. No contact with lawyers. Court-ordered muzzles on broadcast and print news media.

If a Jewish state were run by the secret police, there were be gag orders forbidding journalists to write even of the existence of the gag orders.

Thank God such a thing couldn't happen here.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama's vow that his administration would launch a "relentless response effort" to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf.

One of them was dated Friday - the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling.

from Crikey .....

Here come the towelheads - Abbott hits his stride

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

from Crikey .....

Essential: Rudd is damaged goods, and badly damaging Labor in turn

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Kevin Rudd has led Labor to the brink of a first-term defeat that was unthinkable just weeks ago, with Essential Media's new poll showing Labor's once-formidable lead giving way to a 50:50 2PP.

In 2008, Mexican authorities rejected a shipment of U.S. beef because the meat exceeded Mexico's regulatory tolerance for copper. The rejected meat was returned to the United States, where it was sold and consumed, because the U.S. has no regulatory threshold for copper in meat.

The whistleblower who exposed lying Penrith MP Karyn Paluzzano says it will be ''almost impossible'' to find a new job after his bruising experience with the NSW Labor Party.

Tim Horan, whose evidence to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), prompted Ms Paluzzano to quit Parliament for rorting parliamentary expenses, told The Sun-Herald that Premier Kristina Keneally's staff had sought to discredit him every step of the way after he came forward.

From all the uproar, you would think that the government's new super tax on the resource companies was the greatest moral challenge of our generation. To coin a phrase.

The miners want us to believe they face a disaster of biblical proportions. There would be floods, fire and famine, earthquakes and plague, the veil of the temple rent in twain, widows and orphans begging in the streets, the horsemen of the Apocalypse thundering by.

from Crikey .....

Corey Bernardi's sinister plot to ban the burqa

Greg Barns writes:

In the Court of Appeal yesterday morning, six former Guantánamo prisoners - Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga - won a resounding victory against the government, when three senior judges, including Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, overturned a ruling that, for the first time in British history, allowed the government to use secret evidence in a civil claim for damages.

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has become the latest casualty of the hyper-vigilant image police at Apple HQ.

DeGeneres apologised on air this week for a spoof iPhone commercial that she ran on her daily talk show poking fun at her inability to send text messages from an iPhone.

She said the spoof did not impress Apple when it aired this week and that she had since been contacted by the company.