Headlines Wednesday 10th March 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

An 1881 Puck cartoon shows Garfield finding a baby at his front door with a tag marked "Civil Service Reform, compliments of R.B. Hayes". Hayes, his predecessor in the presidency is seen in the background dressed like a woman and holding a bag marked "R.B. Hayes' Savings, Fremont, Ohio".

James Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831 – September 19, 1881) was the 20th President of the United States. His death, two months after being shot and six months after his inauguration, made his tenure, at 200 days, the second shortest (after William Henry Harrison) in United States history.
Before his election as president, Garfield served as a major general in the United States Army and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and as a member of the Electoral Commission of 1876. Garfield was the second U.S. President to be assassinated; Abraham Lincoln was the first. President Garfield, a Republican, had been in office a scant four months when he was shot and fatally wounded on July 2, 1881. He lived until September 19, having served for six months and fifteen days. To date, Garfield remains the only sitting member of the House of Representatives to have been elected President.

=== Bible Quote ===

“who has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,”- 2 Timothy 1:9

=== Headlines ===

In the very body sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, an e-mail is circulating warning Senate staffers not to view one of the most popular news sites on the Web, claiming it could spread computer viruses.

Massive Prius Recall
Toyota reportedly will recall 2004-2009 Prius hybrids to investigate issues with trapped gas pedals

Rush to Rewrite History?
Shannon Bream on freelance writers replacing historians and authors to churn out textbooks

Guilty Plea for Letterman Extortion
Former CBS producer cops to $2 million 'Late Show' host extortion plot, expected to serve six months in jail


Love on the rocks for distressed model as cricket star fiance weighs up whether to walk in wake of nude picture scandal.

Gen Y shrugs off financial crisis
THE young kept on spending as the rest of Australia trembled at the thought of a deep recession

Inside the secret world of the Freemasons

FOR centuries they have existed within society but outside it, hidden amid secret oaths and rituals. Legend and rumour were allowed to run rife, blaming them for the control of kings and kingdoms, presidents, prime ministers, parliaments and whole economies. Even The Simpsons had a go at them with the classic "Stonecutters" episode. But the Freemasons have had enough. Using the interest born of Dan Brown's blockbuster novel The Lost Symbol, which focuses on the organisation, Freemasons United Grand Lodge of NSW and ACT Grand Master Dr Greg Levenston decided to reach out. He has overseen production of a book called It's No Secret - Real Men Do Wear Aprons, out this week, and invited The Daily Telegraph into the Freemasons' most secret chambers.

Bullied girl wins landmark compensation
SUPREME Court brings hope to girl who endured years of abuse at primary school.

Asylum family jump 65m to their deaths
TRIO so afraid of being deported they tied themselves together and leapt from their high-rise home

Sum of all fears: maths in serious decline
NUMBER of Australians studying maths and science is falling to dangerous levels, finds report.

Hundreds hurt each year by falling TVs
FOUR-year-old girl is lucky to be alive after 30kg television inflicted horrific head injuries.

Fake police Facebook page fools users
A ROGUE website that claims to be official site of the Victoria Police accuses officers of using torture and lying under oath.

Migrants must obey new laws
NEW migrants to Australia from all ethnic backgrounds will have to "demonstrate a unified commitment" to the nation under new state laws to be introduced.

Cindy Crawford blackmailer jailed
A MAN who extorted money from the model over a photo showing her child gagged and bound was sentenced to jail for two years.

=== Journalists Corner ===

Congressman Eric Massa speaks out!
Was he ousted for opposing the health care plan, & what really triggered his ethics probe?

Guest: Lou Dobbs
Immigration overhaul! Can Obama & Congress compromise on how to handle illegals in America? Lou Dobbs sits down with Bill!
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Guest: Karl Rove
Karl's tell-all book! From the Bush presidency to the Washington power plays and how decisions really got made behind-the-scenes! Karl speaks out!
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Pelosi's Persuasion Problem?
Is the speaker having trouble bringing wavering Dems on board? Congressman Paul Ryan reveals the true state of health care in the House!

=== Comments ===

Fury on the Far Left
By Bill O'Reilly
First, a viewer warning. We have some rough tape coming up, but we have to show it to make a serious point.

We begin with the ACLU. On Sunday, the far-left outfit took out a full-page ad in The New York Times criticizing Barack Obama for thinking about handing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed back to the military.

The ACLU is crazed about this. It wants Al Qaeda terrorists to be tried in civilian court so that the USA can be attacked by lawyers representing the terrorists.

And then there are the pundits on NBC. There was angst about Liz Cheney's organization, Keep America Safe, criticizing American lawyers who have defended captured terrorists in the past. We played you Ms. Cheney's ad last week:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The message of that ad is Dick Cheney is still out there and he's still angry about the way his war is being treated by history, by historians and frankly by…

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: So this is daughter of Dracula.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it's daughter of Dracula, and you know, it's…

MATTHEWS: It's like in the old movie "Gotham."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

To be fair to Mr. Matthews, the daughter of Dracula thing is harmless but does demonstrate NBC's continuing mindset.

And now it gets crazier. I hesitate to use actor Sean Penn anymore on "The Factor" because he's so over the top, but here he is again defending Venezuela's socialist leader Hugo Chavez:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN PENN, ACTOR: Every day this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it and accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should — truly there should be a bar by which they — one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

We're sure Mr. Chavez would approve of Mr. Penn's proposal.

On the same program, Bill Maher talked about politically driven violence:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL MAHER, HOST, "REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER": Yesterday, one of them tried to shoot his way into the Pentagon. Or did he? This is sad. He left a — they got him but, you know, he left a rambling paranoid manifesto on the Internet about how the government was going after his freedom. You know, it's sad when we see crazy, senseless deaths like this, we can only ask why? Why? Why couldn't it have been Glenn Beck?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Now I guess that comes under the heading of satire, but if anybody here on Fox News said anything like that, the left-wing media would go nuts, and everybody knows it.

Finally, we lower the bar even further with this comment about Sarah Palin from comedian Kathy Griffin:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KATHY GRIFFIN, COMEDIAN: She's so famous as governor, you know, when John McCain picked her after meeting her for 10 minutes. And that must have been some (INAUDIBLE).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Now can you imagine if someone on Fox News said that? But if you're a far-left kook, you can say just about anything and the left-wing media will likely ignore it, especially if you attack Gov. Palin.

By the way, the women's groups remain silent as Mrs. Palin continues to absorb unfair cheap shots.

So what is driving all the far-left angst? It's pretty simple: President Obama is not living up to far-left expectations.

Mr. Obama understands that he must move to the center to stop the bleeding in the polls, and that is why the radical left is melting down.

Expect more amusement to come.
===
President Obama's Warped Priorities
Michael Goodwin
President Obama has given some 35 speeches on health care, spent entire weekends trying to cut a deal with House and Senate leaders and wasted a full day on a summit to nowhere. All for a monstrosity America doesn't need or want.

Meanwhile, the White House says a decision on where and how to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed is still weeks away. "This hasn't gone up to the president yet," Robert Gibbs said.

There is no better illustration of Obama's warped priorities. He's determined to jam a health-care takeover through, but isn't involved in a key national-security debate. Time is finite and for Obama not to have devoted any of his to the case of the 9/11 masterminds is shocking -- but not surprising. The facts don't fit his politics.

Attorney General Eric Holder's dopey idea to bring the KSM trial to the federal courthouse only blocks from Ground Zero crashed into a stone wall of public opposition. Even if he tries to move it, Congress wants to deny funds for a civilian trial anywhere. The president backed Holder's plan, but his reluctance to get involved now can mean only one thing: He has no clue about what to do next. There was no Plan B and there still isn't.

This is shameful. Even amid reports a military trial at Gitmo is likely, the White House has not officially canceled its New York plans. Lower Manhattan leaders wrote to Holder in January, suggesting ideas and asking for clarification, and never got a reply.

Assuming anything is going on, it's probably an effort to horse-trade a military trial for KSM in exchange for GOP support for closing Gitmo. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is at the center of talks, but he's frustrated by White House disarray. "I've never figured out who's in charge," he told The Wall Street Journal.

Silly me. I thought the president was in charge.
===
WE AIN’T BRUNO
Tim Blair
So you think you’re a good driver. Perhaps, if equipped with the right machinery, you imagine that you could even be a racing driver.

Think again. Here’s Bruno Senna – who’ll compete in Formula One this year – driving two high-powered road cars, the likes of which you and I could buy were we rich enough:

Now, I’m an OK driver. Quick enough not to totally embarrass myself on a closed course, cautious enough not to kill anybody on public roads. And I’ve driven both these cars Senna is driving, so I have a point of comparison. A very exact point, as it happens, precisely at 1:35, when the Brazilian is chatting to the passenger seat camera while flinging that Porsche around.

No. Hands. On. The. Wheel.

In similar circumstances, friends, you and I would be white-knuckling that steering wheel as though we were clutching to a cliff face. Oh, and at 1:54, note how Senna suspends his right hand free of the wheel so that he can strike it at the exact instant to correct a slide. This is something we cannot do.

In the Nissan, Senna lets the thing correct slides by itself; he’s basically steering it with his right foot. Easy for him. Impossible for us.
===
Barbarians through the gates
Andrew Bolt
The rise of the barbarians:

A MAN in a wheelchair has been punched in the face, stomped on and hit on the head with metal bars at a train station in Sydney’s west.

The 35-year-old Canadian national was trying to leave Mt Druitt station when two males began verbally intimidating him last night, police say.

As he entered the lift, one of the attackers allegedly punched him in the face, causing him to fall onto the ground. The pair then stomped on his body, tried to take his chair and belongings, and struck his head with metal bars.

They allegedly returned a number of times to attack the man again with the bars, but were eventually arrested by police after a foot chase.

A 17-year-old boy is currently assisting with inquiries at Mt Druitt police station. A search is under way for a second male, described as being of Pacific Islander appearance and aged in his teens.

The victim has been taken to Nepean Hospital in a serious condition and will require surgery for severe cuts to his head and a depressed fracture to his skull.

Not incidentally, this should make us reconsider how compatible some immigrants are with the Australian culture and economy, given the extraordinarily high rates of imprisonment of people from certain countries. Check the place of birth of our prisoners against the numbers here, and you’ll find that while 0.13% of all Australians are prisoners, the proportion in jail for Tongans is 0.74%, for Samoans is 0.64%, for Fijians is 0.26% and for New Zealanders 0.20% (and almost certainly higher for Maori, who compromise more than half New Zealand’s prison population).

(Thanks to reader Colin.)

UPDATE

Reader John Comnenus converts the data into this graphic:

He explains the medthodology and the color coding:
===
Abbott on his own
Andrew Bolt
Tony Abbott’s colleagues are rightly furious:

(The) Opposition Leader’s colleagues rounded on him for failing to consult them before announcing he would hit big business with a $2.7 billion tax increase to fund a six-month, paid parental leave scheme…

Sources said Mr Abbott did not seek the input of his most senior colleagues, including Julie Bishop and Nick Minchin, in the development of the policy.

About 20 MPs and senators at the (party) meeting expressed concern, mainly about the lack of process…

Outside the party room, MPs were more hostile, with several saying Mr Abbott had forgone his right to attack Mr Rudd for broken promises and wanting to increase taxes. Criticism ranged from ‘’ill disciplined’’ to ‘’absolutely crazy’’. ‘’The natives are unhappy,’’ one said.

David Uren warns:

THE Coalition’s plan for a $2.7 billion company tax surcharge to pay for parental leave would make Australia the fifth-highest taxing country for business in the OECD…

University of NSW tax specialist Neil Warren said it was not unusual for countries to have lower tax rates for small business, however, he knew of no other nation imposing a tax surcharge on big business. “This is not good economics,” Professor Warren said. - Bolt is inflating opposition to Abbott. - ed.
===
Who’d have thought that such ancient coral could survive us, too?
Andrew Bolt
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the warming alarmist who keeps predicting catastrophe for the Great Barrier Reef, finds his own university now publishing news to puncture his scares (while, of course, going out of its way to still talk of the “huge stresses” caused by “human activity"):

Fossil corals, up to half a million years old, are providing fresh hope that coral reefs may be able to withstand the huge stresses imposed on them by today’s human activity.

Reef ecosystems were able to persist through massive environmental changes imposed by sharply falling sea levels during previous ice ages, an international scientific team has found. This provides new hope for their capacity to endure the increasing human impacts forecast for the 21st century.

(Thanks to Queensland Uni’s K.)
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A captain isn’t a real captain if he isn’t on the field
Andrew Bolt

Peter Roebuck is being monstered on ABC radio this morning for this call, after Michael Clarke left the one-day team he was captaining to rush to the side of troubled girlfriend Lara Bingle:

Michael Clarke needs to choose between a fraught personal life and his career in cricket. All the evidence indicates that the current position is untenable…

Clarke’s hasty and presumably urgent trip home from New Zealand denies him the luxury of privacy. It is no small thing for a vice-captain to walk out on a team at any stage, let alone on the eve of a big match…

Ordinarily, a player rushes home upon hearing some dreadful news of a family loss, impending or completed. Or else he has been informed of a devastating sickness. Now and then a player is allowed to attend a birth in the modern way. Occasionally depression strikes a player down, a curse that afflicted Marcus Trescothick on the last Ashes tour. On these occasions, all and sundry conduct themselves with due sensitivity.

Clarke’s case is different. His responsibilities do not permit withdrawal on any except the most desperate circumstances. None of the evidence indicates that any such conditions prevailed. Certainly he heard some bad news about his partner, but it pertained to disarray as opposed to crisis.

I quite agree that cricketers need the chance, like everyone else, to balance their private lives with their professional duties. That’s particularly so when playing cricket for Australia is such a full-on job, involving so much travel. In this case, none of us can judge precisely how acute was the “crisis” which Clarke judged required him to fly back home. It should also be said that Clarke does not do this lightly or often, although he is quite prone to injury.

Yet the plain fact is that a captain who can’t guarantee to be around to do that captaining is not a great captain, after all. Teams involve relationships, too, and stability is critical.

Clarke is quite free to flit in and out of the team as a player while his form is so good, but Roebuck is right: a team needs more than that from its captain.

Ian Chappell makes the very same point:
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Premier finally backs me on dams
Andrew Bolt
Finally, belatedly, a Victorian premier backs my long, long campaign for a new dam:

But still we have no national water plan and most of the water that has fallen in the last week will run off into the sea. Again an abject waste of our most valuable resource, and one that if captured, stored and delivered appropriately could provide for our needs on the eastern and south-eastern sea board of our country for years, not to mention the opening up of hundreds of thousands of hectares of land for agricultural production.

We may be the lucky country, but we would have to be one of the most complacent and wasteful on earth.

Sadly, that Premier is Jeff Kennett, now safely out of office and president of the Hawthorn Football Club, which has no money to build what Kennett now recommends.

(Thanks to reader Sammer.)

UPDATE

Useful things, dams:

Floodwaters are being channelled into vast storage dams on the NSW-Queensland border, saving towns there from major flooding.

UPDATE 2

Engineers Australia puts far too much faith in the CSIRO regional models (which a Technical University of Athens study said ”cannot be credible”) which predict a fall in run off in Victoria’s catchments because of global warming. Yet it’s right to warn that our crazily expensive desalination plant won’t save Melbourne for long:

If no further major policy changes are made, the growing population and economy will eventually result in demand exceeding supply. Following the current suite of augmentation, water storage levels are again forecast to drop to a level requiring Stage 1 water restrictions to be introduced by 2036.

The grossly negligent Labor Government waited too long to find new water supplies the last time, thanks to its green ideology and hairshirt “use-less” philosophy that has had Melbourne on water restrictions for eight years now.

Worse, its failure to act for so long resulted in a mad last-minute dash for a quick-to-build desalination plant for a cost of $3.5 billion - or three times the cost of a dam for a third of the water. Or as the dam-unfriendly Engineers Australia puts it in giving the Government a “C” rating for its water infrastructure:
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Let Patel and Rajiv check Canberra’s policies first
Andrew Bolt
Another immigration rort that’s only belatedly being fixed. Heavens, even my hairdressers, who teach such frauds, have known for years it’s a joke:

ONE in five international colleges are “permanent residency factories” for foreigners who want visas not education.

The head of a review of the $17 billion international education sector said dodgy colleges had been allowed to flourish under successive governments, giving Australian educators a bad name.

Former federal Liberal MP Bruce Baird has recommended sweeping changes to make colleges more accountable and drive opportunists from the sector. The Federal Government immediately backed many of the proposals, including tough new checks on providers and a crackdown on the role of education agents.

Once more I must marvel, as I did over the scammers who ripped millions from Kevin Rudd’s insulation help-yourself and the people smugglers who sussed out Rudd’s weakness, that foreigners and immigrants often with poor English can in an instant find the flaws in schemes that our top politicians and bureaucrats spend months devising. Maybe the wrong people are in charge.

Maybe these schemes should be thrown into a Calcutta bazaar before they’re implemented, to see what survives.
===
Rudd’s dream state is a nightmare
Andrew Bolt
2008:

The great thing about visiting California is that it gives you a sense of where Australia is probably headed. In the context of the climate change debate, this assertion stands, only more so…

Remember, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is something of an environmental pin-up boy for Rudd. During the election campaign, Rudd repeatedly used Schwarzenegger’s embrace of an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2050 to justify his own approach to target-based policy.

The thrust of Rudd’s argument was that if California, one of the biggest and most successful economies in the world, could adopt such an approach, why couldn’t Australia?

2010:

California is likely to see modest job losses in the near term from its aggressive climate change policy due to higher energy costs and other factors, the state’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office said.

And:

California’s unemployment rate jumped to its highest level in more than three decades in January...

UPDATE

Julia Gillard in 2008 was keen to learn from Cailfornia’s green policies:
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Same faith, different victims
Andrew Bolt
What’s the excuse this time? It can’t be the Crusades or colonialism, you’d think:

On the dusty streets of three Christian villages in northern Nigeria, dozens of bodies lined the streets. Other victims of the weekend’s Muslim fury jammed a local morgue, the limbs of slaughtered children tangled in a grotesque mess.

One toddler appeared fixed in the protective but hopeless embrace of an older child, possibly his brother. Another had been scalped. Most had severed hands and feet.

Officials estimate that 500 people were massacred in night-time raids by rampaging Muslim gangs near the city of Jos, where the Christian-Muslim fault line cuts across Nigeria.

Oh:

John Onaiyekan, archbishop of the capital, Abuja, told Vatican Radio the violence was rooted not in religion but in social, economic and tribal differences.
===
City moves three metres to the left
Andrew Bolt
Better reload your sat nav settings:

The earthquake which struck Chile last month moved the entire city of Concepcion more than three metres to the west, say Chilean and US scientists.

The power and devastation of recent earthquakes - particularly those in Indonesia in 2004 (228.000 deaths) and Haiti in January (220,000 dead) - shows that man-made warming is a trivial worry in comparison.
===
Those most guilty should pay
Andrew Bolt
It’s taxpayers who must now pay up, when it’s really the bully’s parents who should be the first to fork out:

AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD child is capable of threatening to kill and assaulting a classmate while showing clear intent, a Supreme Court judge has ruled in a bullying compensation case at odds with criminal law.

Justice Tony Cavanough disagreed with a tribunal that found that Victorian primary schoolgirl ‘’BVB’’ should not be awarded compensation over a campaign of bullying by a group of other girls that included repeated threats to kill and assaults by ringleader K.’’…

Under Victorian criminal law, children ‘’under the age of 10 years cannot commit an offence’’ - as they are presumed incapable of forming the necessary intent. Criminal law also requires proof beyond reasonable doubt that children under 14 understood what they were doing was wrong.

But Justice Cavanough said that in BVB’s case, there was no suggestion any of the bullying incidents occurred accidentally.... When the victim and her attacker were aged eight, K repeatedly threatened to kill BVB and have her uncles kill her, the tribunal found. It established that K menaced the victim with scissors and a broken bottle and frequently punched, kicked, pinched and spat at her.

When BVB’s parents called police, officers gave a general anti-bullying presentation at the unnamed state primary school. The bullying continued over the next three years and several other girls were involved…

VCAT said ... it was surprised ‘’so much harassment was meted out to a quiet child for so many years without more intervention’’ by the school.

To say the barest minimum.

UPDATE

Astonishing:

And even today the girl, now 15, is harassed and ridiculed by the same girls, who have turned to Facebook… Living in a small community, the girl must face her attackers often and suffers panic attacks and post-traumatic stress.

Why don’t others in the community step in? Or is this Wake in Fright country? Should the bullies and their families at least suffer the same public humiliation over Facebook that the victim alone now suffers?
===
Indonesia cool on Rudd’s diplomacy
Andrew Bolt
Another grand Rudd plan bites the dust:

PRESIDENT Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has told Kevin Rudd that Indonesia is unlikely to support his push for a new Asia-Pacific community as Jakarta sees the existing ASEAN bloc as its priority…

The initiative unveiled in June 2008 by Mr Rudd envisages a “pan-regional mandate” among countries as diverse as the US, China, Japan, India and Indonesia to be in place by 2020… But interest has been mixed, with ASEAN nations - especially Singapore - wary of any moves to dilute the group’s collective clout.
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Weak horse isn’t respected
Andrew Bolt
Too much apologising makes people think you’ve got something to apologise for:

The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin—51 percent to 41 percent—Americans think the standing of the U.S. dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama’s presidency.