Friday, August 29, 2008

Headlines Friday 29th August

Sydney transport a rail embarrassment
By Rhys Haynes

HERE'S proof that Sydney's rail network is a laughing stock when compared with its global peers.
Beautiful Sunset
Experts have compared Sydney's public transport infrastructure with major cities including New York, Paris and Barcelona - and the embarrassing results speak for themselves.

And the architect behind the report says the State Government's failure to build any "significant" transport infrastructure in the past 80 years is the reason for the shocking gap. -But the ALP have ruled in NSW for all but seventeen of the last eighty years. Four of those seventeen years had independents in charge .. like Clover Moore. It is clear that Sydney has been starved of funding by the government during that time. New York and Paris, both famed for left wing dominance are still more balanced in their admin history. The truth seems to be that no one benefits from ALP government but the ALP.- ed.
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Garrett would have damned Garrett
Andrew Bolt
Environment Minister Peter Garrett is living the dig-it-up-and-flog-it life he once condemned:

The Midnight Oil frontman sang against the nuclear industry in the track Maralinga.
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Rudd’s great plan is someone else’s business
Andrew Bolt
KEVIN “Watcher” Rudd has scrabbled urgently for policies to make him seem a man of substance, and not just endless spin.

And guess where the Prime Minister finally found them?

That’s right. In the same place he found his tax cuts. In John Howard’s pile of Useful Policies for Doing Good.

So this week Rudd dusted off several of the Liberals’ best and most radical education ideas and presented them as his own “education revolution”.

Desperate—but how badly Rudd needed to produce something to show he’s more than the man who gave us FuelWatch, GroceryWatch, WhaleWatch and more of the promise-big-achieve-nothing same.

And credit where due.
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Sick of the scare
Andrew Bolt
I STAGGERED into my local hospital’s emergency department last Thursday and found out just how sick the global warming alarmists really are.

Not a single bed to be had. Not there, or anywhere near, either, I was told.

No, I’m not saying the beds were all filled with people sick with “climate change delusion”—described by the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry as a condition that gives victims “visions of apocalyptic events”, that leaves them too scared to drink a glass of water for fear “that, due to climate change, (their) own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people”.

The people in the trolleys around me didn’t have eyes bulging from fear or crazed lips cracked from dehydration.

They seemed just the usual emergency cases, plus a few extra old folk pole-axed by the wheezes and diseases they tend to get in winter.

The hospitals were always this full at this chill time of year, the nurses told me. It was the cold.

Only a few weeks earlier, NSW Premier Morris Iemma had announced a winter health strategy to deal with the fact that admissions to hospital between July and September typically increase by 6 per cent.

That’s when I realised just how sick a stunt Mornington Peninsula Shire had pulled on its terrified residents. I was so cross I wasn’t sure if I was still trembling from fever or fury.
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Save a seal; heat the planet
Andrew Bolt
Bugger polar bears, think of the poor seals:

AN Arctic seal, nicknamed Sahara, has a phobia of cold water and experts have called for help in the form of an ice machine.
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Islamic rules made compulsory in London
Andrew Bolt
Submission demanded by Britain’s rising new faith
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BBC: We’re missing the humanity of the Taliban
Andrew Bolt
If we just learned to see the niceness of the Taliban, they would ... well, something:

A BBC presenter has attacked coverage of Afghanistan’s ongoing war, claiming TV reporters are not covering the ‘humanity of the Taliban’.

Lyse Doucet, a presenter and correspondent on BBC World News, was speaking at a discussion of TV reporting of the war in the country…

Asked what was missing in British coverage, she added: ‘It may sound odd but the humanity of the Taliban, because the Taliban are a wide, very diverse group of people.”

Let’s report the Taliban the Doucet way. So, readers, find the unreported humanity in these recent Taliban happynings
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Advice from Finland’s schools: No migrants
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd wants to give parents assessment data to let them compare schools with like schools. This has outraged his critics, who - like the ABC - are fighting back by comparing Australia to a country that’s not like at all:

Finland, which scores highest on the international league tables, has no official school assessments but instead owes its success to a strong investment and respect for its teaching profession.
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Shock: world to warm as it has for centuries
Andrew Bolt
Emeritus Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Center says he has trouble seeing any man-made warming:

An almost linear global temperature increase of about 0.5°C/100 years (~1°F/100 years) seems to have started at least one hundred years before 1946, when manmade CO2 in the atmosphere began to increase rapidly. This value of 0.5°C/100 years may be compared with what the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists consider to be the manmade greenhouse effect of 0.6°C/100 years. This 100-year long linear warming trend is likely to be a natural
change.
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Rudd gets busy with WorldWatch
Andrew Bolt
What is this - Rudd’s seventh or eighth trip overseas, in just nine months of office? I’ve honestly lost count:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are expected to head to New York next month to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

What a strange addiction Rudd has for strutting the international stage, doing almost nothing at all of any note.

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