Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Lateline

Her explanation of her atheism, her respect of Christianity and other religions along with her dislike of islam was very interesting.

Transcript should be here soon, the video is here already.

Note the Wikileaks story...

Update: Don't watch Lateline

Maxine McWho's on... trumpeting how Kevin and the ALP saved Australia from the recession with their well planned, well executed stimulation...

She speaks through gritted teeth, and she always gives the impression that she's talking down to everyone, even her peers...

Can't find a link, the transcripts aren't up yet, and I don't know which part of the program it was on.

Oh, here you are. The link. Here's some of the transcript...

MAXINE MCKEW: OK. Can I just raise someone else we haven't mentioned this week, and that is Senator Nick Minchin's departure from the Parliament. Now he's going to be missed by his party, indeed by a ought lot of people, I would have thought, in the Parliament. A straight shooter. Very much both a social and an economic conservative, but I would think that conservatives like Nick Minchin, even though of course he helped propel Tony Abbott to the leadership, would be in something of two minds.

Clearly there are conservatives like Nick who are in line with Tony Abbott's social views, but will look at his economics, his economic management and be thinking, you know, "Where's he going?" Abbott owes more of his economics to someone like B.A. Santa Maria than, say, a Milton Freedman.

You've got Malcolm sitting there on the backbenches, George, as you know, a free marketeer, believes in a market mechanism for emissions trading. Quite right - I agree with him. But I would have thought there are still big fishes there in the party in terms of, if you like, your liberal wing and the economic dries. Abbott, would say, is an old-style interventionist.

LEIGH SALES: Senator Brandis?

GEORGE BRANDIS: Let me let you in on a secret, Maxine. The only economic management we talk about in the Coalition is your economic management, your disastrous economic management that has taken Australia from the strongest position in the OECD when the Coalition left office to the worst public debt that this country has ever seen in peace time. So, you can be a commentator, Maxine, you can be a commentator, but at the sharp end of politics this is about the Rudd Government's performance, and the Rudd Government's performance in economic management has been lamentable.

MAXINE MCKEW: OK, and I am proud to be part of a government that did not blink when we looked like going into recession and the stimulus, the scale of it and the breadth of it, is what has kept us from recession.

And George, the only figure to look at is the fact that we have 5.3 per cent unemployment. That's the national employment figure. (inaudible) in the United States, it's 10 per cent.

LEIGH SALES: If I can interrupt there, there are some other figures to look at and those are the figures to do with the school buildings program. We've seen some example come out about ridiculous costs for school building projects. How do we know what the extent of that is? Could it be another insulation program where there are - where there is example after example of these price gouging cases taking place?

MAXINE MCKEW: Well, let's just break that down. Example after example. As Julia Gillard has pointed out, we're talking about 20,000 plus projects across something like 9,500 schools and the national hotline has had fewer than 100 complaints.

If we just come to NSW, Education Minister Verity Firth has had an audit underway and where there have been problems - and there's one in the papers today - that has been addressed.

From here it just gets better... er, worse.

Wongbot short circuits....

Tony Jones, attack bantam, asks. Then away she goes, or not.

Read it here...

And I just think I need to fix this:

PENNY WONG: Well, we've put out an enormous amount of modelling; in fact, I think Mr Abbott criticised us the other day in the Parliament for putting out too many pieces of paper. But can I just say, make this point, Tony - and Mr Howard himself said that it was unrealistic for people to say there wouldn't be an impact on costs if we were going to do the things that were needed. You can't fix climate change without costs. The question answer is: how do you best pay for that?!

Interesting about these "working families" and others who will get compensation. Where exactly do these people, who think that this Extra Tax System is such a fantastic idea, think that the compensation will come from? Where do they think that the producers of every product we need, and some we don't, who use energy, and those who transport these goods, who do they think will be paying for these taxes imposed for energy?

Hint: manufacturers, transporters and general businesses which will all pay increased costs will not be absorbing these increases.

Update:
You know, you could replace the "PENNY WONG" with "KEVIN RUDD" and noone would know the difference! Is she some sort of clone? Listening to so many in the ALP ranks of the rank they do all sound the same!

Flannery's incomplete understanding - admission sailed right over Tony Jones' head.

TONY JONES: I mean, what sceptics like Andrew Bolt would argue is that it's happening because there are people out there who don't believe these scientists, now they appear to have proof, there's a dissension among the scientists, and they are not letting the public know that there's dissension between themselves about the arguments about what is happening. Take one, because one of these published emails, it goes to one of the hottest sceptic arguments, that since 1998, and I say hot, you know, advisedly, because 1998 the hottest year, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased after that, but the temperature did not keep going up. So the argument of the sceptics is therefore the theory of global warming is not working like it should.

TIM FLANNERY: Well, the thing is we deal with an incomplete understanding of the way the earth's system works, we know enough to say as the IPCC said that greenhouse gases cause warming. They are 90 per cent sure, 90 per cent plus sure that it's caused by humans, we can go that far. In the last few years, were there hasn't been a continuation of that warming trend, we don't understand all of the factors that create earth's climate, so there are some things we don't understand, that's what the scientists were email about, you know, we don't understand the way the whole system works, and we have to find out.

TONY JONES: The published email that made the front pages of papers was from a respected US climatologist, called Kevin Trenberth saying we can't account for the lack of warming, it's a travesty that we can't. He appears worried that science is not doing the right thing or the climate is not doing what he expected it to do.

TIM FLANNERY: No, it's not. These people work with models, computer modelling, when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that's when science gets engaged. What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, "We have to get on our horses and find out what we don't know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn't reflect it". And that's the way science progresses, we can't pretend to have perfect knowledge, we don't. We have to go forward and formulate policy on the basis of what we know now.

TONY JONES: Is it right that cooling occurring? I mean 1998 was the hottest year, there's many other hottest years since recorded history in that 10 year period. Are they right to say it's cooling or not?

TIM FLANNERY: We had a huge cooling event in Sydney between yesterday and today. Time scales are important. If you take too short a time scale you won't get a climate signal, you get a regional weather signal or whatever else. The scales that the climate scientists use to look at the overall trend is century long, and on that trend we are still warming, sure for the last few years we have gone through a slight cooling trend, we saw it in the 1940s the same sort of thing, but that does not negate the overall warming trend.

Read it all here.

ABC Lateline - Ian Plimer demolishes AGW and Snow Cone Tone

Here's the link to the preamble, click on 'Professor says no threat from global warming' (04:33) in the video links. Oh dear, but in the first part they connect him to "Big Mining".

Click on 'Ian Plimer discusses his book denying global warming' (18:03) for the interview with Tone.

Just beautiful.

Tone is really, er, superior to the interviewees he disagrees with, isn't he! Perhaps supercilious (emphasis on the silly bit).

Thanks Habib, at Tim Blair's

Lateline tonight...

Should be good. Here's the site, for when it's updated.

Update: Anyone watching Lateline?

Very interesting!

Leigh Sales latched onto Julia Gillard not answering her questions a few times.

Watch the interview when it's posted. It's there...

Update:
Yes, Mehaul! She was taken aback at being put back on track to answer the question and also the interviewer making suggestions about the plans of the ALP regarding AGW/CC and an ETS.