Auspundits

America's Culture War

* By Lounge Lizard

Who can forget Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican Convention in which she accepted the nomination as John McCain's running mate?

Joe McCain, John McCain's brother, gave an insider's account of the speech in an article in The Australian of September 16 entitled The real barracuda.

In this article, Joe McCain revealed that the joke Palin told about hockey moms who, unlike pit bulls, wear lipstick, wasn't in the script. Indeed, she went so off-base during her speech that eventually the teleprompter operator decided to turn the thing off.

For the speech of her life, that demonstrated enormous self-confidence.

Lounge Lizard watched her as she spoke. He noted that she was a very fit and healthy looking person and that she was totally at ease with herself, her family and with being an American. She betrayed not the slightest hint of nerves.

She's tough.

She not only preaches conservative values but the choices she and her family have taken in life's journey demonstrate to ordinary Americans that she lives by those values.

And that drives the left totally nuts.

Lies, Damned Lies & Journalism

* By Lounge Lizard

In a recent post, On Palin's Sambo Comment, Manny draws our attention yet again to the main-stream media's (MSM's) willingness to publish unverified rumour and innuendo if it happens to suit their generally left-wing political agenda. The latest target is, of course, Sarah Palin, a backwoods yokel who confesses, horror upon horror, to being a Christian and who just happens to be in charge of an administration with some 15,000 employees, net assets of over $US 50 billion and revenues of over $US 14 billion per annum.

By now we've become inured to the media's persistent failure to undertake elementary fact-checks and its constant repetition of falsehoods, especially when reporting on Republicans in the US generally and George W. Bush in particular.

A classic example is the old "plastic turkey" canard, which still won't die. As Tim Blair notes:

George W. Bush’s plastic turkey has ruled the global mediascape, from the Guardian to Pravda and the ABC, from the Sydney Morning Herald to the New York Times. This mighty bird, feasting on rich crops of gullibility and ignorance, may outlive the Bush administration. For as long as there are those who believe, the plastic turkey will remain forever real!

On Palin's Sambo Comment

As Tim Blair points out in two posts, it's a fake "allegation...made by someone writing under a false name, who was published by a Californian vanity activist site, quoting someone whose full name isn’t supplied, who works at a restaurant that is not identified, a “few days” after Obama’s nomination."

Not even Obama wants to go near it. And it appears that neither the SMH or the Age have this scurrilous story on their websites any longer. Say are Fairfax staff still on strike? That could explain why they have mindless monkeys pushing this story onto the front page. But even mindless monkeys would be equal opportunity offenders: I haven't seen any "Obama is a Muslim" stories on there.

And then I get weird looks when I tell people I don't read the SMH. Still wonder why?

Correction to TB: This story does not appear on the front page of the SMH.

Update 10/09/08 @ 10AM AEST: Oopsy indeed. Yesterday's SMH (9/9/08) did have this story on the front page. Thanks to Maulman in comments. Un-be-lievable.

Also, Salon runs a few slimy Palin columns comparing her to Muslim terrorists and a dominatrix. Ed notes that:

I find this fortnight of reaction utterly fascinating. When challenged by a strong, self-made woman, what has the mainstream media done? They have painted her as:

• A hick
• A slut
• A bubble-headed beauty queen
• A bad mother

Meanwhile over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens begs Democrats to cease and desist. As expected, Hitchens engages in some religious bigotry and points out the folly in other Democrats doing likewise:

[Palin's] local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be "cured." I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn't the case or how it's much worse than, and quite different from, Obama's own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden's lifelong allegiance to the most anti-"choice" church on the planet. The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical.

The media's generally hyperbolic coverage of Palin has been astounding, even to someone like me who has a very low regard for its ability to maintain neutrality in reporting (let alone commentary). I bumped into a news producer of a large Australian media outlet over the weekend. Of course, without knowing at the time that he was in the news business, I launched into a tirade about the bias of the mainstream media. He found it short of offensive and declared that most reporters try very hard to remain objective in their reporting. And the layers of editors ensure all facts are checked and double checked. This clearly failed spectacularly in what is probably the biggest political story at the moment.

Mickey Kaus over at Slate punts on the likely cause of the media's willingness to publish unverified rumour and innuendo:

We are now, I think, making the next logical leap, to a model in which unverified rumors about public figures are discussed and assessed not just in the blogosphere or the unrespectable tabs but in the MSM itself. I say welcome! With NYT reporters and bloggers all openly discussing unverified reports,, whatever is true will become un-unverified that muhch [sic] faster. And the public is proving, by and large, to be quite capable of distinguishing between stories that are true and rumors that are still being investigated.

And my two exit question: if Kaus' theory holds true,

1. why are the MSM not investigating Obama's real unrepentant terrorist friends with the same intensity and independence?
2. how do MSM'ers feel about this paradigm shift?

The Five Faces Of Darkness

Despite the setbacks that God has inflicted upon us, these painful blows will mark the beginning of the wiping out of America and the infidel West after the passing of tens of years, God willing. - Osama bin Laden, 17 December 2001

Charlton Heston R.I.P.

Charlton Heston has died. Best known (to me anyway) for his role in the movie classic, Ben Hur, Heston was also remarkable off stage. He was a civil rights campaigner in the 1960s and went on to be president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in for a number of years starting in the late 1990s.

Also well known are leftist lampoons of him. Michael Moore is notorious for deceitfully gaining access to Heston's private villa and badgering Heston, Alzheimer's ridden and all, about the Columbine massacre in the docu-drama, Bowling for Columbine. I eagerly await Moore's obituary.

Heston's passing has not stopped the media from attacking him. AP's piece (I linked to earlier) said the following:

He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and chairman of the American Film Institute and marched in the civil rights movement of the 1950s. With age, he grew more conservative and campaigned for conservative candidates...His latter-day activism almost overshadowed his achievements as an actor, which were considerable.

So being an early activist on civil rights causes (which at the time had bi-partisan support) was overshadowed by him becoming more conservative as he grew older. Well, that's what happened to many Scoop Jackson Democrats in the 1980s when their party became increasingly radical. When the group you caucus turn into crazies, you disassociate. Joseph Lieberman being a contemporary example.

Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Dead

Bold assertion. Where is the evidence? Well, in two recent posts, Anthony Watts and Basil Copeland looked into commonly used temperature records and found something quite startling: the rate of increase in global mean surface temperatures during the 1980s and 1990s was equivalent to the increase over the 1920s and 1930s. Not because of the massive increase in CO2 output over the latter half of the 20th century, but despite it. Therefore, there appears to be a exogenous factor driving Earth's climate (well, at least not CO2).

Keeping Good Company

With Thomas Jefferson that is. He apparently said:

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Apparently, the market thinks likewise. Ad revenues for newspapers fell approximately 10 percent in 2007 from 2006 in the United States. Still $US42billion too many.

I don't read newspapers for news anymore except for the selected opinion piece. Read blogs (see the blogroll to the right) and read books. Much better informed.

H/T: Bryan Caplan, Econlog

Cheney Tangos With Saudi King *BUMPED*

Over the last three months, the two most powerful men in the world, U.S. president George Bush and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, have visited Riyadh. At both meetings, energy security (read, oil) was discussed. With the price of crude oil persisting over $US100/barrel, this should not be a big surprise. During the first meeting, it was well publicized that U.S. President Bush requested the Saudis loosen their oil spigots and pump more crude on the world market, only to be rejected. Some even called the request groveling. Not so the second meeting Cheney attended. This time, Cheney came armed. No one tells the U.S. where to go.

Climate Change News

Some tidbits that have come together over the last few days:

• The truth comes out: climate change/global warming is being promoted despite serious scientific objections because these would impinge otherwise flourishing environmental initiatives such as population control and economic deceleration:

  The climate crisis is a powerful tool to motivate change - like checking the ever-expanding global population and excessive resource consumption - and if the urgency of climate change is compromised, other environmental projects may fall by the wayside.

• The Earth's climate has an inbuilt stabiliser with regards to CO2 concentration and temperatures. How do we know that? Because a young scientist bothered to look at the maths underlying those fancy global climate models and found a problem: the math that these models are built on assumed that the atmosphere was infinitely thick. Oops. What's worse is that his employer, NASA, refused to release the results because the $US5billion it receives for climate research may fall as a result. His paper was later published in a peer-reviewed journal and supported by statistical analysis performed and published in another peer-reviewed journal. He was once a global warming activist. His new model has also been successfully backtested on data from Mars. That's how science is done.

• Oh and that consensus? Bang it goes. Over 500 attendees at the International Conference on Climate Change that included scientists, economists, bureaucrats and business leaders supported a statement that said amongst other things:

  ...there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change. Now, has anyone read about this in their newspapers? Yeah, I thought not.

H/T: Andrew Bolt

Sally: Not The Girl From Next Door

Tonight, the ABC Four Corners program is airing an "investigative TV journalism" piece entitled "Dangerous Ground" on the heels of a study done by Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Centre:

A recently completed three-year study found that Australia's tough stance on counter-terrorism and security could actually be increasing the threat of breeding home grown terrorists. Erring on the side of aggression – just to be on the "safe" side - can radicalise and alienate the people who are targeted, analysts tell Four Corners...As Four Corners reporter and author on terrorism Sally Neighbour illustrates, defeating terrorism presents not just a policing issue but also a challenge to core community values of pluralism and tolerance.