Headlines Wednesday 12th May 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, KG, PC (7 May 1847 – 21 May 1929) was a British Liberal statesman and Prime Minister, also known as Archibald Primrose (1847–1851) and Lord Dalmeny (1851–1868).
Rosebery was a Liberal Imperialist who favoured strong national defence and imperialism abroad and left-wing social reform at home, while being solidly anti-socialist. He left the Liberal Party in the mid-1900s and increasingly associated with the Conservatives.

=== Bible Quote ===

“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”- Ephesians 4:32

=== Headlines ===

YOU'LL get more cash in your savings accounts, tax time will be simpler and there'll be a little bit more in your take-home pay. - these are the empty promises Swan gives, but cannot deliver on. -ed.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's Senate confirmation could pose challenges for Judiciary Committee members — her lack of lengthy paper trail making their job that much harder.

Cameron New British PM
Conservative leader David Cameron becomes British prime minister after Gordon Brown resigns

Obama Calling 'Information' a Threat?
President suggests less is more when it comes to news media, which some see as swipe at blogs, cable TV

Mojave Desert Cross Heist
Seven-foot-tall cross that has been the subject of a Supreme Court legal battle was ripped down and stolen

Gold cross stolen from Williams' coffin
WIDOW of gangland killer distraught over robbery that took place just before he was buried.

Parents on alert for meningococcal
HEALTH experts warned parents to be aware of a meningococcal outbreak after two children - including an 11-month-old baby - were diagnosed with the disease .

France votes to ban the burqa in public
FRANCE has unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the burqa, setting the stage for a national ban.

Flat raid by police as hunt for nurse killer Michelle Beets widens
POLICE investigating the murder of nurse Michelle Beets have raided a flat in Sydney's north, combing the premises for possible clues to the killing.

Imelda Marcos looks set for political comeback
IMELDA Marcos, the flamboyant widow of deposed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, looked set to make her political comeback yesterday, more than two decades after fleeing a popular uprising. The former first lady, 80, had comfortably won a seat in the 269-member House of Representatives, according to her aides. Her only son Ferdinand "Bongbong'' Marcos Jnr, 52, was headed for the 24-seat Senate while eldest child Imee, 56, appeared set to be made governor of the family's home province of Ilocos Norte, according to aides and partial results. The clan has won various positions since the 1990s after returning from exile but they have never before managed a position as high as the nationally-elected senate. - suggesting their will be hope for the ALP after the next election too. -ed.

=== Journalists Corner ===

The President's Pick
What impact could Elena Kagan have on the nation's highest court?
Guest: John Bogle
As Congress tries to get answers for the market tumble, could D.C.'s regulations end up hurting your 401k?
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Karzai's D.C. Trip
A show of strength ... or support? We break down the Afghanistan president's Washington visit!
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Trillion Dollar Bailout
How is the economic crisis overseas impacting the U.S.? Could we be next?

=== Comments ===

The kitchen cabinet cooks up a mess
Piers Akerman
TREASURER Wayne Swan has produced a fantastic Budget. Fantastic - as in created in the mind, illusory and unrealistic. It is the equivalent of a fiscal pink batts scheme, with all that disastrous program’s potential to explode into flames, and has all the authority of the Rudd Government’s discarded emissions trading system. - It is a bitter lesson, but those three wasted years may provide us with the lesson we need that irresponsible government should never be countenanced by responsible people. Those that supported the Rudd government may have done so out of the mistaken belief that the Australian electoral system was resilient enough to protect us from such self serving stupidity as we have witnessed. They were wrong and it is an expensive lesson, but an important one too.
Now, let me point out that not everyone has learned their lesson. I note that News.com.au posted a link recently to a ‘fun site’ where people could create their own budget. The script allowed people to make their choices of cuts and expenditures, then it ‘examined’ them and cast them in the light to suggest the player was a supporter of Rudd and opposed Mr Abbott .. all in fun. Or the pre tax poll by ninemsn.com asking if we supported further expenditure on health .. of course I do, if it is responsibly spent, but not if it isn’t. The caveat I provide was not part of the poll, so the results are meaningless in that no sensible person would oppose them unless they were being sensible. We have had an expensive lesson, and still we got the liberal media spruiking the irresponsible to do their magnificent deeds of foolhardiness. I am reminded of Ann Taylor’s “The Maniac’s Song” - ed.
===
Good News for Americans Who Want a Sane Country
By Bill O'Reilly
As you may know, Attorney General Eric Holder has been leading the charge to define the War on Terror as a police action, not a military war.

"Talking Points" believes that is a tremendous mistake by the attorney general, that the military should be interrogating and trying captured terrorists, who can easily abuse the civil system and run up billions of dollars of costs to the taxpayers.

President Obama understands this issue has hurt him, and I believe has ordered Holder to pull back.

On Sunday, Holder was interviewed on NBC and cited the so-called public safety concern when talking about captured terrorists. The public safety law is a vague exception that allows authorities to question someone without Miranda rights if they believe an act of terrorism is ongoing, a "ticking time bomb" scenario.

Apparently Holder now likes the public safety exception, especially in the case of the Times Square guy Shahzad:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: He was given his Miranda warnings after the public safety exception questioning was finished, and he has talked to us. We want to work with Congress to come up with a way in which we make our public safety exception more flexible and, again, more consistent with the threat that we face. Yes, in fact, this is big news. This is a proposal that we're going to be making and we want to work with Congress about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Now, that's an about-face for Holder, and once again, I think President Obama ordered him to do it.

So that's good news for all Americans who want their families protected by the feds.

There was also good news today in the stock market, as Greece, which is on the verge of collapse, will get bailed out by the U.S. and other countries.

As you may know, Greece is a chaotic socialistic country, and many Greeks don't care about anything other than their free entitlements, which have completely bankrupted the nation. So they riot and embarrass their country in front of the world.

But the world understands that if Greece goes under, the entire economy of Europe totters, thus a billion-dollar bailout. That makes the U.S. corporate bailout look like chump change.

The good news here is that once again socialism is proved to be a disaster, and we hope President Obama is taking notice. Entitlement societies will always fail. The USA must stop its crazy spending.

Finally, the president has nominated the former dean of the Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. We believe this is one liberal replacing another, but we don't know just how liberal Dean Kagan is. We anticipate she will be confirmed.
===
REGIONAL PAPER MOCKED
Tim Blair
Expert media analysis from the ABC:

It was a dry, boring, no-frills budget and the newspaper coverage was for the most part accordingly dry, boring and no-frills. Thank God, then, for the Northern Territory News which hands-down won the competition for best post-budget front page:
I’m happy to be corrected by a Territorian who has access to the hardcopy of the paper, but I can’t find a single word of budget analysis on the paper’s website. That is, except for a ... reader poll: “Do you think the NT budget is good for the Territory? YES/NO.”

Now that’s how you do budget coverage.

Er, yes. Except that our expert is looking at yesterday’s paper. Here we have today’s NT News, complete with a front-page pointer to its budget coverage:
UPDATE. ABC online editor Jonathan Green enjoys “lotsa laffs” at the NT News. Yeah, those stupid hicks sure are dumb. An archive of front pages is available here, for those who wish to check publication dates and so on.

UPDATE II. The author of this bungled takedown is a university lecturer specialising in New Media.

UPDATE III. Another blunder: ”The Age mainly stuck to dry analysis of the budget measures and devoted proportionally little space to the Opposition’s criticism – for instance, noting a $12 million boost to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet without running comment from anyone opposed to such a measure.” Age writer Misha Shubert replies:

The Age did run detailed opposition criticism in this piece. It also included a line from Steve Fielding slamming the budget boost to the PM’s department.

Media is really difficult.
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BROWN DOWN AND OUT
Tim Blair
An advance on yesterday’s news:

In an emotional speech outside No 10 Gordon Brown has resigned as Prime Minister, saying he will tell the Queen to invite David Cameron to form a government.

Further here.
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BROAD CHURCH
Tim Blair
The Illawarra Greens select Peter Moran as their candidate for the 2010 federal election:

“I’m a truck driver myself …”

(Via D)
===
Voters in search of a new leader (but not Rudd)
Andrew Bolt
Poll watcher Andrew Catsaras describes the startling collapse in Labor’s support:

In the last fortnight the ALP has lost 5 per cent of its primary vote, according to Newspoll and Nielsen. That’s a lot of unhappy ALP souls. Taken literally, over 650,000 ALP voters are wandering around in the electoral bush looking for a new campsite. About 240,000 have found a haven in the embrace of Tony Abbott, about 120,000 have moved into Bob Brown’s arms and, the biggest group, about 290,000 are wandering around in the electoral wilderness looking for other parties and independents.

There’s an interesting history to all of this (see voting intentions table below).
===
Rudd throws more billions down a hole in the ground
Andrew Bolt
It seems Rudd has wasted yet more billions on his green folly:

AUSTRALIA’S focus for slowing climate change - the planned storage of power-station carbon dioxide emissions - has been dismissed by a US study as “profoundly non-feasible’’.

The Rudd and Bligh governments have made carbon capture and storage (CCS) - under which planet-warming emissions from power stations would be removed and stored underground permanently - their biggest single direct investment in new technologies to fight global warming.

The Rudd government is spending $2.4 billion on CCS projects and is putting $100 million a year into the Global CCS Institute it created last year…

Michael Economides and Christine Ehlig-Economides, in a study published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, found that for one commercial-scale coal-fired power station, the underground storage area for the removed CO2 emissions would have to be ``enormous, the size of a small US state’’…

``(Storing CO2 in a closed system) will require from five to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.’’

UPDATE

The brilliant young Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, a charming man I met last year, explains why cosmic rays may be more important than man in influencing our climate.

Shaviv also features in a beautifully filmed new Danish series on cloud theory, which stars Henrik Svensmark and starts here:

(Via Chiefio. Thanks to readers John and Rick.)
===
Ignore Jeffries: Mar’n for Prime Min’ster
Andrew Bolt
Reporting from Question Time, James Jeffries tries to sabotage my Make Mine Mar’n campaign - and admittedly scores a hit:

The only thing that kept our mind from wandering to thoughts of self-harm was our sheer awe at watching Resources Minister Martin Ferguson using some sort of highly advanced stealth technology to slip whole squadrons of syllables past our ears undetected.

UPDATE

Mind you, I think Mar’n would like to have swallowed a lot more of his syllables in this speech two years ago, in which he praised the Government’s “fair and predictable” investment regime, praised the “transparency” of its decision making, and claimed it was a “delighted” recipient of investment from foreigners in our resources sector.

Poor bloke then has to hear his Prime Minister say this in defending the Government’s surprise decision, made without consultation, to snatch 40 per cent of “super profits” of mining companies with a restrospective tax:

Big companies like BHP - it’s more than 40 per cent foreign owned; Rio Tinto more than 70 per cent foreign owned. We believe it’s time for the Australian people . . . to get a fairer share of the natural wealth of this country, which ultimately is owned by all Australians.

I’m hearing that Ferguson is not just swallowing his syllables, but his tongue.
===
Brown gone, Cameron in for now
Andrew Bolt
Labour gives in:

British prime minister Gordon Brown has announced his resignation, paving the way for Conservative leader David Cameron to take power five days after deadlocked elections.

The announcement came as the Conservatives appeared to be finalising a power-sharing deal with the third-placed Liberal Democrats.

This will be some uneasy marriage. The Lib Dems are to the Left, but had no option but to go with the (relative) strength. For now.

UPDATE

The BBC reports that Nick Clegg will be deputy Prime Minister - a great victory for the Liberal Democrats and a sign that this may be a genuine coalition.
===
Budget reaction roundup
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann:

In a very real sense, this budget is built entirely on ‘building in the unexpected’. That China will keep booming and thus, self-evidently, it is guaranteed not to stumble or worse. So that is precisely the unexpected event we - and the government - have to fear… The single biggest number in the budget is a $95 billion increase in expected tax over the four years to 2012-13 compared with the projections in the 2009 budget due to “parameter and other variations”. That’s Treasurese for: we’ll get more tax because of a stronger economy. Otherwise known as: what’s thanks in Mandarin?

Paul Kelly:

Treasurer Swan’s third budget shows a return to strong growth, a surge in tax revenues, a re-emerging private sector and plenty of new jobs. Only a government of epic incompetence could lose an election from here. Rarely in its history have the lucky country’s accounts looked better… In this budget, real spending is kept to 0.9 per cent, distinctly below the 2 per cent cap in real terms that is government policy. This leaves scope for more campaign pledges consistent with restraint.

Dennis Shanahan:

THERE’S only one number that counts in Wayne Swan’s pre-election budget - $1 billion - that’s the surplus in 2013 and the foundation for the 2010 election campaign. Despite the Treasurer’s brave claims that his proud achievement of getting the budget back into surplus “in three years and three years early” is purely about the economy, it is clear the Rudd government has put all its political fortune on being re-elected as “fiscal conservatives”.

Ross Gittins:

Rudd goes flat out all year, every year promising to spend money. At the same time, however, he’s hugely sensitive to the opposition’s charge that he’s a bad economic manager who’s leading us into deficits and debt. So every year at budget time there’s a reckoning, where the purse-string ministers force him to break promises and push off spending until the budget is back on track.

Michael Stutchbury:

WAYNE Swan’s Lucky Country has come up trumps again thanks to the same China-fuelled mining boom that powered the economy through the global recession… Whatever holes you try to poke in it, the bottom line result is a stunning testament to Australia’s good fortune and - mostly - good macroeconomic policy.

Jennifer Hewitt:

It is true there is relatively little new spending to entice voters in an election year—largely because there has been so much of it already. Swan knows that the idea of government spending and debt is toxic to a public concerned about wasted money in areas like insulation and school buildings. That leaves Canberra relying far more on promoting the virtues of restraint. Kevin Rudd will be rebadging himself as the economic conservative he promised voters he would be in the last election.

Piers Akerman:

The Budget was for all real purposes dead on delivery and here’s why. It all rests on the introduction of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 40 per cent super resource rent tax, the so-called super profits slug, which it predicts will deliver a return of $12 billion by 2013-2014… The super resource rent tax is, however, no certainty. Indeed, the likelihood of the tax, dreamed up by Rudd and his kitchen Cabinet (Swan, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and deputy PM Julia Gillard) being passed at the level declared by Rudd is fast receding.

Malcolm Maiden:

Despite its policy backflips, its management of the economy continues to be one of its big selling points, as today’s quietly powerful budget papers underline.

Shaun Carney:

Wayne Swan’s third budget offers the government an unlikely lifeline, an opportunity to return to the fundamentals of national politics. Why is it an unlikely lifeline? Partly because this budget seeks to express its virtue by being so mundane; the government definitely does not want to be seen to be shooting for the stars.

Peter van Onselen:

THE government hopes to be able to overshadow its embarrassing backdown on plans to introduce an emissions trading scheme by 2011, delayed until at least 2013, with a grab bag of goodies on the renewable energy front. It won’t happen; the public won’t be fooled.
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Budget smooth on the outside, desperate within
Andrew Bolt
THIS is a Budget worth boasting about - if it didn’t rely so crucially on desperate tax grabs, heroic assumptions and broken promises.

And if it didn’t betray just how much we’ve paid for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s mistakes already.

The boast is that the Government got us so well through a global financial crisis that it promises a boom next year.

Even better, we’ll return to a Budget surplus by 2013, three years ahead of schedule.

This is indeed good news, and gives Rudd a powerful argument to take to the next election, given many people assume he really is responsible for a recovery he didn’t see coming.

True, there were remarkably few new giveaways of the election-year kind, and the few that were announced on Tuesday rarely sang.

One of the biggest was $467 million for “individual electronic health records”, yet few voters will know how precisely that’s meant to make them better.

But Rudd has not only run through our surpluses, but our patience. He’s promised so much and delivered so little that another flurry of promises could only have increased the growing scepticism many voters seem to feel at his every word.

So, sober and steady was the key - and it was particularly vital that he honour his word last year to keep real spending growth to no more than 2 per cent a year until we’re back into surplus.

On all these critical points, the Budget was good for Rudd. The 50 per cent tax rebate on interest earned on bank deposits should also help him, and help our savings, too.

But look deeper in the Budget and you can see the desperation - even trickery - that produced his most flattering numbers. And you can see the billions he’s so recklessly wasted.
===
A test of our honesty instead
Andrew Bolt
Another snapshot of a land now suffocated by spin:

MORE than one million children began national literacy and numeracy testing yesterday, as state education authorities fended off claims that schools were manipulating the controversial sessions to boost results.

Allegations that underperforming students had been told to stay home emerged in Queensland and Victoria, while in NSW the news agency AAP reported it had been leaked a question from yesterday’s spelling, punctuation and grammar test.
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Cartoonist attacked
Andrew Bolt
This hounding of a cartoonist is going to turn out very ugly - for him, for free speech in Sweden, and for the Muslims there, too:

A Swedish artist who angered Muslims by depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a dog was assaulted Tuesday while giving a university lecture about the limits of artistic freedom.
Lars Vilks told The Associated Press a man in the front row ran up to him and head-butted him during a lecture, breaking his glasses but leaving him uninjured…

Vilks has faced numerous threats over his controversial drawing of Muhammad with a dog’s body, but Tuesday’s incident was the first time he has been physically assaulted.

Earlier this year U.S. investigators said Vilks was the target of an alleged murder plot involving Colleen LaRose, an American woman who dubbed herself “Jihad Jane,” and who now faces life in prison. She had pleaded not guilty…

Swedish news agency TT said police detained two people during the commotion… University officials said there had been a peaceful demonstration by Muslims outside the university before Vilks started to speak, and that about 250 people attended his lecture.

UPDATE

Everything about the incident screams a warning about the integration of Muslims in a Western country: the violence, the intolerance, the youth of these Islamic fascists, the trivial provocation and the need for so many police to protect a man’s fundamental right to speak.
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Europe gets the trillion-dollar jitters
Andrew Bolt
A trillion-dollar rescue is still not enough:

The euro fell on Tuesday as concerns about the euro zone’s ability to contain a debt crisis blunted initial enthusiasm after this week’s $1 trillion rescue package.

The euro retreated from Monday’s high near $1.31, at one point falling below $1.27 as investors wondered whether weaker euro zone economies can deliver the drastic spending cuts and tax increases needed to get their fiscal houses in order.

“Markets aren’t buying the story. It’s clear that the markets remain very concerned about the fiscal outlook for Europe,” said Mike Moran, senior currency strategist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York.

Voter anger in hard-working countries at having to bail out manana cultures now threatens to erode the European Union:

Germany’s support for the European Union has been so unflinching that it’s taken for granted, but are cracks now emerging in the wake of an unpopular decision to help bail out a struggling Greece?

Voter resentment over the price of the Greek bailout helped cost Chancellor Angela Merkel her majority in the upper house this weekend in what she called a “bitter defeat” for her party, and the country’s media have kicked up a storm over paying for other Europeans’ mistakes.

On Monday, Merkel had to tell her shrinking constituency that thanks to the financial crisis and an increasingly tight budget she was abandoning her hopes of pushing through tax cuts — even as she pledged to support a new rescue package for the eurozone.

So whose idea was this huge bailout?

President Obama ... was on the phone with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, offering urgent advice — and some not so subtle prodding — that Europe needed to try something big… Now, Mr. Obama told Mrs. Merkel that the Europeans needed an overwhelming financial rescue to end speculation that the euro — and European unity — could crumble.

Economics advice from Obama? Merkel must have been mad to take it.

UPDATE
German voters are furious at having to bail out the Greeks, and so is the Bild, Europe’s biggest-selling paper, protesting: ”We are again the schmucks of Europe!.”

Britain’s bill for the bailout varies between £10bill and £43billion. But there is no doubt on the continent that it is Germany that is picking up the lion’s share of the tab. Now German citizens have also been told that a tax cut is shelved for at least two years, and will probably never materialise in the life of this administration.

Last week their chancellor promised Greece over 22billion Euros worth of aid over the next three years.

On Monday that was made to look like loose change when Angela Merkel said Germany’s share to underwrite the currency in total would be 123billion Euros.

Today, Bild said: ‘The EU and the Eurozone want to spend a massive 750billion Euros to save the European currency. Germany alone will have to fork out 123billion Euros for its bankrupt neighbours.

‘There is now not enough money for the planned tax cuts here!

‘Are we really the schmucks of Europe?

‘Chancellor Angela Merkel said: ‘We are protecting the money of people in Germany.’ Really?’’
===
No wonder they keep coming
Andrew Bolt
Private jets and four-star hotels. Welcome to the lifestyle of a Rudd asylum seeker:

THE federal government is spending millions of dollars on private VIP jets to fly asylum seekers between Australia’s detention centres.

With each of the specially chartered flights typically costing more than $100,000, the Department of Immigration has spent $5.6 million to March 15 this financial year on 45 flights…

Yesterday it was reported that the government had awarded Brisbane’s Palms Motel a $1.2 million contract to house family groups of asylum seekers.

(Thanks to readers Aussie Mum and Mark.)
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Warmists toast Abbott on the fires of their bigotry
Andrew Bolt
YOU want to see a religious bigot? Then watch Tony Abbott say “Jesus” and “climate change”.

No, no, no. It’s not the Opposition Leader who’s the bigot.

It’s the journalists, scientists, politicians and other followers of the new warming faith who instinctively cackle when he speaks.

Example?

Take last Friday, when Abbott visited Adelaide’s Trinity Gardens Primary School and told the children it had been warmer than now “at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth”.

Abbott plus Jesus plus warming scepticism? Kaboom! What an explosion of sneering and jeering we’ve heard ever since, from followers of the new faith, mocking the old.

It was best summed up, unwittingly, by environment reporter Adam Morton, who wrote in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald: “Tony Abbott is under pressure to justify telling students it was considerably warmer when Jesus was alive after leading scientists said his claim was wrong.”

Morton quoted three such warmists, including Kurt Lambeck, president of the Australian Academy of Science, who tut-tutted that Abbott should look at published data with an open mind.

Tas van Ommen, of the Australian Antarctic Division, reportedly added that any definitive statement about temperatures 2000 years ago was “completely unfounded”.

And Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, whose own ludicrous climate claims include a warning that 750,000 Australian homes face drowning from rising seas, lectured Abbott against teaching children to be sceptical.

This laugh-at-the-Jesus-freak party then raged on over at the websites of The Age and SMH, where covens of warming bigots howled at Abbott’s claim, convinced by their deepest prejudices that he must be wrong.
===
For your diary
Andrew Bolt
On a speaking tour of Australia in June, three prominent sceptics:

Anthony Watts
A television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air, Anthony Watts operates a weather technology business and runs one of the most popular science blogs on the internet, wattsupwiththat.com. He will present advance results on his surface stations project to photographically survey every one of the 1221 USHCN weather stations in the USA used as a “high quality network” that has fallen into neglect.

David Archibald
An Australian scientist operating in the fields of climate science and cancer research, and the author of “Solar Cycle 24: Why the world will continue cooling and why carbon dioxide won’t make a detectable difference”.

David Stockwell, Ph.D.
Former U.S. scientist, living in Emerald, QLD, and author of the book Niche Modeling, David Stockwell presents the “known knowns” of climate change, especially for the Central Highlands environment, mining, pastoral and agricultural industries.

For dates and cities, go here. Bob Carter, Tim Curtin and Peter Ridd are also speaking on some dates.

UPDATE

Professor Bob Carter discusses his new book, Climate: the Counter-Consensus.
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The pocket Windschuttle: making a monster of Neville
Andrew Bolt
Here’s the fourth of reader Tony Thomas’s summations of the key arguments of Keith Windschuttle‘s important new book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - Vol III: The Stolen Generations.

Today: the sliming of AO Neville.

(Previous essays in this ‘Pocket Windschuttle’ series are also collected at http://www.quadrant.org.au. A page reference given as 245.6 means it is on p245 and 60% down from the top of page. Keith Windschuttle and Tony Thomas waive copyright on Pocket Windschuttle essays,)

Strangely, all the Stolen Generation historians are very loath to name the governments and ministers who must have launched and guided the stealing of half-castes in their jurisdictions. After all, nasty welfare officers and brutal police can’t just run around grabbing half-castes off their own bat – they’re public servants after all. One thing a public servant (even a department head) likes to do, is cover his/her backside by pointing out, “My superiors told me to do it.”

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Huge taxes and shelved ETS make Rudd a “fiscal conservative”
Andrew Bolt
Dennis Shanahan sums it up crisply:

THE Rudd Government is using new taxes and the mining boom Mark II to base its re-election pitch on a claim of good economic management using an early return to budget surplus in 2012-13 and an extended cap on Government spending.

Among the main points:

Budget deficit of $40.8 billion, or 2.9 per cent of GDP, down from $57.1 billion in 2009-10.

Growth of 3.25 per cent in 2010-11 and 4 per cent in 2011-12. Unemployment set to fall slightly from 5.25 to 5 per cent. Inflation forecast to decrease from 3.25 to 2.5 per cent. Total government spending of $354.6 billion. A 2.0 per cent cap on real spending growth until surplus reaches 1.0 per cent of GDP.