Headlines Tuesday 28th October

Rees is on the same old track to nowhere
Piers Akerman
NEW Premier Nathan Rees, whose performance in his two former portfolios _ water utilities and emergency services _ never suggested he was anything other than a plodder, seems determined not to deviate from the dismal performances of his failed predecessors, Bob Carr and Morris Iemma.

But at least he has admitted that the people of NSW were right not to believe the State Government when it promised big rail projects.
Given Labor’s history of failure to deliver almost all of its major projects, except the brilliantly successful Olympics (and the bid was run by the former Fahey Liberal government), the real wonder is why NSW still has a Labor government after 13 years.
The answer, perhaps, is that Labor is better at reading the polls and delivering populist messages.
(Remember the scare campaign about the number of public servants a Liberal government would axe, should it win office, which the ALP ran before last year’s election?)
Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph’s State political reporter Joe Hildebrand revealed that a decade after outlining a huge transport initiative for Sydney, the Labor Government had failed to build a single rail project.
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Licence to dissent
Andrew Bolt
British journalism lecturer and warming alarmist Alex Lockwood says my blog is a menace to the planet. Sceptical bloggers like me need bringing into line, and Lockwood tells a journalism seminar of some options:

There is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate scepticism online is free to contest scientific fact. But there is enough here already to put forward some of the ideas in circulation.

One of the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf, and lead for Google’s Internet for Everyone project, made a recent suggestion that the Internet should be nationalised as a public utility. As tech policy blogger Jim Harper argues, “giving power over the Internet to well‐heeled interests and self‐interested politicians” is, and I quote, “a bad idea.”

Or in the UK every new online publication could be required to register with the recently announced Internet watchdog...

Strangely, Lockwood sees no irony in canvassing controls on dissent in order to defend “media freedoms” - apparently believing that media freedom is at best the freedom to agree with him
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Save them
Andrew Bolt
Geoff Strong explains why we need to change the way we foster children from wrecked families:

Our experience is of a system driven by an ideology that the solution for all children is to stay with their biological family at just about any cost, and that this will somehow be possible if resources are thrown at the problems.

Foster or permanent care parents are made to feel the least important part of the solution.

Even before we met her, Chloe gave us a clue as to what was really missing in the life of such a child. When told there was a couple willing to bring her up, her first question was: “Can I call them Mum and Dad?”
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If he were more popular, we’d be ruined
Andrew Bolt
It shows how spin beats substance:

KEVIN Rudd has emerged from the days of the financial crisis as popular as he ever was and has overtaken Malcolm Turnbull on economic management.

The Government’s $10.4 billion emergency economic boost and the guarantee for all bank deposits has been enthusiastically endorsed.

Of course, handing out cash for Christmas will always be popular - until Rudd’s bill comes in. But praising the bank deposits guarantee as well?

Consider: to prevent a run on the banks that may not actually have occured, the Government rushed in a deposits guarantee that was so badly flawed that it caused a run on other financial institutions
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Cooling to warming “solutions”
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd gets a poll boost in the polls, thanks to the financial crisis, but is also sent this wise warning:

FEARS of the global financial crisis are driving people from the Rudd Government’s carbon reduction plans, with most Australians now either against an emissions trading scheme or wanting it delayed beyond 2010.
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Bias wins, democracy loses
Andrew Bolt
Michael Malone, of America’s ABC, rightly protests:

(N)othing , nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign… (E)ven Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass—no, make that shameless support—they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press…
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Even Osama could donate to Obama
Andrew Bolt
No one has raised so much money for a US election campaign as Barack Obama, with $600 million raised so far and counting. If he were a Republican the media would scream about the buying of this election.

But attorney Scott Johnson at the New York Post says the Obama campaign’s famed on-line donation system “invites fraud”:

It has chosen to operate an online contribution system that facilitates illegal falsely sourced contributions, illegal foreign contributions and the evasion of contribution limits.