Headlines Tuesday 4th November

What else has Obama got?
Piers Akerman
BARACK Obama’s predicted victory in the US presidential election is more likely to usher in a bleaker future for the globe, not the bright new dawn his optimistic supporters are hoping for.

Obama, an inexperienced first-term senator, has not presented the world with a blueprint for the future, he has run his extraordinarily successful campaign on nothing more than the promise of change.

As we have seen in Australia over the past 12 months, change is not always for the better.

Obama’s promised change is part of what pollsters are claiming as the mainstay of his attraction - vision.

Unfortunately, his vision is no more than the word. His vision is one-dimensional. It is in reality nothing less than a mirror in which supporters can see anything they hope to see. It is limitless, constrained only by the imagination of those who feel the need to embrace change and vision.

Empirically, however, all the evidence shows Obama is more limited than limitless. He is a creature of the historically corrupt Chicago political machine, an organisation that could teach WA Inc and the ALP’s notorious NSW Right about political larceny.

He is an enthusiast for the cause of victimhood and attended and wholeheartedly supported a racist church leader for the past two decades until the media reluctantly exposed the hate-spewing sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor of choice until the middle of this year.

Last weekend, when former US president Bill Clinton endorsed the man who defeated his wife Hillary in the long struggle for the Democratic Party’s nomination, it was worth remembering that Wright had preached in Obama’s church that he (Clinton) “Did us (black Americans) like he did Monica Lewinsky”. Obama didn’t object.

Clinton prided himself on his relations with black Americans and was called by many commentators an honourary black but that cut no ice with Wright, who also preached God damn America.

That would have suited the man credited with launching Obama’s political career, the unrepentant former urban terrorist Bill Ayers, and Ayers’ partner Bernadine Dohrn, who served time in prison for her role in the Weatherman domestic terror bombings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Obama has said his own limited political experience largely hinges on his work as a community organiser. That would be for the activist organisation ACORN, which has been cited numerous times across the US for falsifying information used to register voters. - I cannot speak for Obama, but I must say that I am very impressed with the graciousness of McCain. The mugging of McCain and Palin by Democrat supporters has been shameless. Were one to believe Democrat rhetoric, one would not believe it possible that Democrats would so poorly serve a cripple, torture victim and a woman. One shouldn’t believe the Democrat rhetoric- ed.
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Journalists agree: Republicans all morons
Andrew Bolt
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A pay rise for people without pay
Andrew Bolt
Michael Stutchbury exposes the danger of Labor’s love for more regulation of the labor market:

LUCKILY, foreign investors didn’t notice. But the minimum price of labour in Australia was raised by just over 4 per cent last month amid the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression.
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Rudd’s three excuses - and none
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd has three defences to the charge that he leaked, and insultingly distorted, details of a private chat he had with George Bush. All are laughable.

To sum up the issue:
On October 25, The Australian reported that Mr Rudd took the call from Mr Bush on October 10 while entertaining dinner guests at Kirribilli. It was reported that during the phone call, Mr Bush asked, “What’s the G20?” and that Mr Rudd was “stunned”.

Here’s Rudd’s first defence:
Mr Rudd sought to deflect attention by demanding Mr Turnbull apologise for comments by John Howard last year that Barack Obama was the preferred candidate of the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

Pardon? Rudd is excused the leaking, and twisting, of a private conservation with Bush because the previous Prime Minister was critical of Barack Obama? To say that’s the kind of excuse you’d expect of a 10-year-old is to insult many 10-year-olds.

Here’s Rudd’s second defence:

The Prime Minister told reporters yesterday that during a phone call 10 days ago to discuss the global financial crisis, Mr Bush never asked him what the G20 was. “...the President did not make those remarks,” Mr Rudd said.

Actually, Prime Minister, we already knew Bush couldn’t have said what you claimed he said of the G20. That was what made your leaked account of your chat to Bush so much more offensive. The question is why you once did claim Bush knew nothing of the G20 and that you had to put him right. Answers, please. Why did you leak the details of your call with Bush, and why did you tell untruths about it?

Rudd’s third defence:
Mr Rudd would not be drawn yesterday. “On the source of individual stories, there are multiple conversations with multiple people from political offices and elsewhere which leads to the construction of a story,” he said.

Pardon? Are you denying you leaked details of the conversation to, say, the editor in chief of The Australian, who was at your dinner table when you took Bush’s call? Are you denying that your staff briefed The Australian on the call, and with your permission? Are you saying that you told “multiple people” from “elsewhere” about this private call? Did you tell those “multiple” people that Bush was a goose who didn’t know about the G20, or did they dream up that detail by themselves? How did those “multiple” people come to ascribe that very detail - which you admit was false - to you?
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2030: China to add what US emits today
Andrew Bolt
Here’s why cutting our own greenhouse gases is worse than useless without China agreeing to do the same:

China’s greenhouse gas pollution could double or more in two decades says a new Chinese state think-tank study that casts stark light on the industrial giant’s role in stoking global warming…
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Smearing Menzies
Andrew Bolt
Some 100,000 Australians lined the streets to farewell Sir Robert Menzies as his body was driven slowly to Springvale ceremony. Yet our longest-serving Prime Minister - who presided over an astonishing boom - has attracted the hatred of a generation of historians and writers, some of whom have invented the most astonishing smears and recycled the most preposterous rumors to vilify him.

In his 2008 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, Gerard Henderson lists some of the worst sinners ...
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Murdoch’s Australia
Andrew Bolt
Rupert Murdoch puts bluntly the huge and rapid change - and competition - that we will confront within a generation:

In sheer numbers, the emergence of India and China as economic powers and the wealth that they are creating is accompanied by a rise of a new middle class. Over the next 30 years or so, two or three billion people will join this new global middle class. The world has never seen this kind of advance before. These are people who have known deprivation. These are people who are intent on developing their skills, improving their lives and showing the world what they can do. And they live right in Australia’s neighbourhood.

The alarmists will tell you that Australia cannot compete with these nations. That is rubbish. In this new world, Australia has many advantages. These advantages include being an open, democratic and multi-racial society built on the rule of law. We have great resources as a civil society with a tradition of generosity and support. To compete well and use our human capital to the best, we will have to draw on these advantages and make our country stronger. That means being less dependent on government, less complacent about our national institutions, more willing to accept radical reform, and more trusting in our creativity and our competence.
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Barack: the blank sheet
Andrew Bolt
Two prominent black conservatives aren’t buying the Barack Obama hype.
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Rudd rushes where Europe retreats
Andrew Bolt
Europe suddenly seems a lot less hurry to cut emissions, which makes Kevin Rudd’s rush seem all the more quixotic - and suicidal:

EUROPEAN Union member states are ready to grant car makers a three-year delay until 2015 to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of their new vehicles in light of the global economic crisis, negotiators said at the weekend.
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Pranking Palin
Andrew Bolt
Sarah Palin is once more the target of a media trick, designed to make her seem as stupid as she isn’t:
Sarah Palin told a Canadian comedian posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy during a prank call that “maybe in eight years” she will be president.

That she dares dream of a run at the presidency suggests she’s finding more support from voters and important backers than the media likes to let on. And the prank call reveals she’s as natural, optimistic and warm in private as she is in public - but probably in need of much better aides
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They’d be victims under Bush
Andrew Bolt
Now that Saint Obama looks like taking over Guantanamo Bay, the New York Times finally concedes it might be housing some bad guys, after all, and may not need closing.
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Black what’s-his-name wanted
Andrew Bolt
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez just wants the US president to be the black thingummybob
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Swan denies dive
Andrew Bolt
Put it on the record: like Kevin Rudd, Treasurer Wayne Swan denies we’ll have a recession
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And they think themselves holy
Andrew Bolt
How can a religious creed drive men to such wickedness:

AN ISLAMIST rebel administration in Somalia ordered that a girl, 13, be stoned to death for adultery after the child’s father reported that she was raped by three men.