Headlines Saturday 8th November

No time for tears
Andrew Bolt
Many eyes will be on what this inquiry digs up:

NINETY minutes after the Cabramatta MP John Newman was shot in front of his fiancee, the then Labor Party head John Della Bosca offered the seat to Reba Meagher - confirming an offer he had first made hours before the killing, an inquiry has heard.

This new evidence from Ms Meagher, the former NSW health minister, appears to contradict what Mr Della Bosca said under oath at the trial of Phuong Ngo eight years ago, when he denied knowing of any plan to disendorse Mr Newman. Mr Della Bosca stands by this evidence. - I have questions for Della Bosca over a separate issue. The child Hamidur Rahman died from exposure to peanut butter. The coroner has ruled it an accident. Evidence that might have suggested negligence on the part of Hamidur’s institutional supervisors (not carers) appears to have been hidden from the coroner. When a public servant complained to the then Education Minister Della Bosca of being harassed for having correctly reported on the issue, Della Bosca referred them back to a named abuser. That public servant has since resigned from public service. Where is the ministerial accountability? - ed.
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Keating nails Rudd as applause junkie
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd finds that one of the star invites at his campaign launch last year has gone sour on him, and pinged him on his greatest weakness
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No more Mr Nice Guy
Andrew Bolt
Greg Sheridan:

George W. Bush had to rally and uplift Americans in the wake of a shocking attack on their soil. This inevitably meant he focused on enemies. Obama, for the moment at least, can embrace the world as a composite Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and secular pope. He is all things to all men and all women.

Having so few specific political commitments means anyone can project their kindest fantasies on to him. But the remorseless and terrible business of government is always about making hard choices, which please some and disappoint others

A good discussion of the nasty challenges Mr Nice now faces then follows. How will he deal with the hopes he dangerously raised on protectionism, the economy, “saving” the planet, Afghanistan? And what about his bomb-Pakistan pledge, issued to show his toughness? But missing from Sheridan’s list is perhaps the biggest challenge of all to the Obama style: Iran.
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Has the Reserve Bank caught Rudd’s panic?
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann wonders how the Reserve Bank board went in four months from contemplating yet more rate rises to slashing them again and again:

The most obvious interpretation invited by this chain of events is that Stevens and the staff of the RBA turned almost on a dime from still worrying about inflation to being seriously, seriously worried about looming recession.
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Feeling cooler, preaching hotter
Andrew Bolt
Michael Duffy is rightly alarmed:

Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.

As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: ”We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]”.

Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.

So it’s disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri’s presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.
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Checking papers, not character
Andrew Bolt
We live in an over-lawyered age in which process counts for more than judgment. Latest evidence:

THE principal who let controversial artist Bill Henson, a photographer of naked children, into a Victorian school to scout for talent has escaped discipline after being cleared of wrongdoing.
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What Rudd gives, Rees takes away
Andrew Bolt
I’ve mentioned this bizarre contrast before:

THE NSW budget has plunged into a $1billion deficit, forcing the Rees Government to drastically cut spending and lift taxes in a fiscal rescue mission that is at odds with the federal Government’s crisis response to head off a recession.

While the Rudd Government has offered pensioners and families an extra $10.4 billion in an attempt to stimulate the economy, the NSW strategy includes a raft of spending cuts and tax hikes.
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A festival to strike even Hamlet dumb
Andrew Bolt
The Melbourne International Arts Festival now leaves me not angry but something even worse - so indifferent that I haven’t bothered to write a single word about it this time around. And when even Peter Craven, an arts critic with a gargantuan appetite for the stuff, can write as follows we know our arts bureaucracy has not just run the event into the ground, but buried it:

It wasn’t a lack of loyalty to my native Melbourne that took me to Sydney on the opening night of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. It wasn’t even the uncharitable thought that the most international thing about that festival these days was that its director, Kristy Edmonds, was born in Oregon and seemed to imagine that the city by the Yarra got quite enough of that elitist establishment theatre stuff and that what it needed was Japanese geishas mouthing dialogue to silent Mexican films or chaps kneeling before images of their father’s heads saying, ‘Dad, I love you’ after giving the audience a good six rounds of the therapy they had coming to them. Kristy had once given us a deaf and dumb Hamlet from Barcelona and this year, we were getting Romeo and Juliet in Lithuanian set in a pizza parlour.
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Be nice to the masters
Andrew Bolt
Ashley Donnelly, journalism student, has been well coached in the standards of journalism to be adopted in this Chinese century, and is given time on the ABC to preach them:

Traditionally, the premise for Western journalism is to perform the role of a democratic fourth estate by criticising current events or governments…

However, Asian Politics Professor Michael Dutton explained to me that Chinese journalism or “critical thinking” focuses more upon positive news values by way of “saving face for China.” This concept revolves around the pervasive notion of saving face but in context, preserving China’s national image and promoting ways in which the country is improving apposed to ‘failing.’…

During my time in China I worked for a magazine monitored by the country’s municipal government where I was first exposed to this idea of “saving face for the nation,” One of the magazine’s cover photographs did not pass media regulating official’s approval because of its predominately dark tones and arguably sombre faces.

Initially, my Western point of view processed this as a blatant case of China’s harsh censorship. But considering the holistic reasoning behind China’s media and that this photograph did not promote the vision of one harmonious society, my perspective changed.

Mind you, this same approach can now be found among senior journalists, too, covering not China but Barack Obama:

NBC’s Chris Matthews pledges his loyalty: ”I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work.”
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Just another election
Andrew Bolt
Hype that Barack Obama so electrified and inspired the nation that voters were flocking to the polls in record numbers turns out to be yet another myth:

A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago — or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.
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Even Californians blue with greens
Andrew Bolt
California, hailed here as a green inspiration, finds its voters are sick of the big bills that come with green dreams:

Not entirely unexpectedly, two California initiatives that would have substantially expanded the state’s clean-energy profile — but which opponents argued were ill conceived — foundered at the polls on Tuesday.
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Palin defended against faceless critic
Andrew Bolt
Sarah Palin’s camp denies the latest smears - this time peddled by anonymous (note) blame-shifters from John McCain’s team.
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Gillard yearns to manage your needs
Andrew Bolt
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard hasn’t quite left the Left behind:

TRIOLI:

Alright but on that point, when you say letting the market rip, are you suggesting there – it seems to me that you are – that it’s time for large scale, private companies to get out of child care?

GILLARD:

What I’m suggesting is it’s always vital for a government to manage a system when it is providing something that the community needs. Child care is a vital service. Working families rely on it.